PipeLineNews Archives: March 2011

March 29, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Today's PQ leads noting that well funded neo-Marxists are expanding their 5 year plan [so far very successful, right guys?] to take down the 800 pound cable gorilla, Fox News.

1. As detailed in Politico, Media Matters has in a rededicated effort, "declared war on Fox News."

"..The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of guerrilla warfare and sabotage" aimed at the Fox News Channel...The group is assembling a legal team...it has hired..experienced reporters, Joe Strupp...to dig into Fox's operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012..."

We find it fascinating that one of the new team of media assassins it has hired is Joe Strupp, ex of Editor & Publisher Magazine.

At E&P, his columns often descended into the netherworld with him demonstrating a penchant for feeding on the warm entrails of the recently demised, a classic case of which was a hit piece on Ronald Reagan, just hours after the great man had passed away. He also was fond of hectoring the mainstream press to further politicize the war in Iraq, as if that were possible at a time when major U.S. newspapers carried as a gruesome body count, the number of U.S. Servicemen KIA above the fold.

So it seems that in Strupp MM is getting both what it wants and deserves.

We can't exactly imagine Murdoch, Ailes and Beck shaking in their boots, unless its from unrestrained laughter.

2. Also of note, the Anti Defamation League [ADL] has mounted a vicious attack on civil rights activist attorney David Yerushalmi, because we must assume, he has strayed from ADL's apparent belief that Shari'a presents no problem to religious liberty.

The ADL's attack is so over-the-top we are not going to quote it, but we will point out that such irresponsible behavior is not new to the group.

We culled the following from the Rocky Mountain News archives, published on March 12, 2004:

"The Quigleys have collected. The Anti-Defamation League's payment of more than $12 million for defaming them...The money went to the former Evergreen couple more than nine years after ADL officials in Colorado denounced the Quigleys as anti-Semites, based on illegally recorded secret interceptions of the Quigleys' telephone conversations..."

So while Jewry comes under increasing attack from Islamists worldwide, ADL's response is to mount an unwarranted campaign of vilification against someone who has taken a courageous stand against the threat posed by Shari'a driven Islamic jihad.

Whether ADL's donors think this is a wise use of the organization's prestige remains to be seen.

3. The always incisive national security expert Frank Gaffney [Center for Security Policy] highlights the effort of Sen. Dick Durbin to aid American Islamists while they attempt to insinuate Shari'a into the fabric of Western culture.

"How curious. At the...moment that the threat posed to U.S. interests by the toxic Islamist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming ever more palpable, a top Senate Democrat seems determined to suppress Americans' understanding of that menace...Emerson [Steven Emerson, Investigative Project on Terrorism] explained that this perverse role is the rule rather than the exception with Sen. Durbin...He has been in bed with radical Islam for the last eight years.... He has aligned himself with the [Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front] Council on American Islamic Relations, sent them letters of congratulations, agreed to speak to their banquets, fundraised for them, and most recently paid a visit to the Bridgeview Mosque, which...one of the largest mosques in the United States...considered the senior center of Hamas activity in the United States, led by Imam Jamal Said. [He] was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case... against the fundraisers for Hamas, all of whom were convicted. In [a] picture [taken at the mosque], which was printed in the Bridgeview Mosque newsletter online, it shows [Sen. Durbin] with eight people, six of whom are actually allied with Hamas. Five of whom have been listed as unindicted co-conspirators [in the Holy Land trial]. And four of whom have made statements calling for the killing of Jews."

Village Voice Writer, Tom Robbins Joins CAIR's Stealth Jihad

By WILLIAM MAYER

March 28, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In a January 19 Village Voice piece, Tom Robbins says some rather harsh things about the anti-Shari'a video, The Third Jihad [actually The Third Jihad - Radical Islam's Vision for America], apparently believing his characterization to be akin to a conviction on charges of Islamophobia - fortunately this isn't Europe...yet.

"...a spectacularly offensive smear of American Muslims...72 minutes of gruesome footage of bombing carnage, frenzied crowds, burning American flags, flaming churches, and seething mullahs. All of this is sandwiched between a collection of somber talking heads informing us that, while we were sleeping, the international Islamist Jihad that wrought these horrors has set up shop here and is quietly going about its deadly business..."

Excepting the smear innuendo, the basic take is correct, the film accurately portrays the bloody Islamic jihad, pulling no punches.

This is the reality of the Islamist juggernaut to install Shari'a everywhere, at any cost, and Mr. Robbins has the good sense not to deny the authenticity of the images depicted in the video, which is the face of Islamist violence justified by its own practitioners using the Qur'an.

The author contends that members of the New York Police Dept. [and we must assume all law enforcement in general] should never be shown this type of material as a component of their anti-terrorism training. In this twisted perspective, blinding those in the front lines of the battle is infinitely preferable to being subjected to charges of religious or ethnic bigotry.

What particularly seems to irk the columnist is reflected in the line, "Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate," says the narrator, "when in fact if you look a little closer you'll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception."

He finds this statement outrageous, so much so that he apparently sought out CAIR NY for comment.

Robbins' perspective is all too typical in today's media, where certain "sacred spaces," dare not be breached. One of the areas verboten to the old media [and despite its now ancient hipster attitude, the Village Voice, is as an aged geezer, just like the Old Gray Lady herself] - a field laden with ideological and philosophical land mines - is the obvious connection between the quest to impose Islamic law - Shari'a - and the resultant religious warfare [violent jihad] as well as its twin component, cultural/civilizational jihadism [stealth jihad - internal subversion].

Now the MSM and liberal writers are certainly not alone in this practice with governmental institutions designed to maintain American national security similarly engaged in self-censorship [starting during the George W. Bush admin], denuding official language of anything which may negatively reflect on Islam, Muslims or Shari'a, despite its obvious relevance in the battle to maintain a secular, liberty based republican form of government.

There are a myriad of reasons why the old media does this.

One - essentially a Marxist dictum - is their obeisance to a particularly toxic form of multiculturalism which maintains that foreign cultures can't be judged by Western standards, that in doing so one becomes a cultural imperialist. American higher education is in large part responsible for the establishment of this myth and it's continually pounded into the heads of impressionable youth as they matriculate through institutions which have become the ziggurats of the thought police.

Another cause is cultural shame, a process which intellectually disconnects writers from the obvious contributions of the Enlightenment and the Reformation, one of which of course is a free press.

This cultural shame is akin to self-loathing and leads to poor choices among which is an inability to recognize threats and take prescriptive actions.

As is typical in the MSM, certainly reflected in this column, charges are simply thrown out there without substantiation according to the dictates of the aforementioned process because under these operants, certifiable truths become inconvenient sources of psychic discomfort.

True to form, when all else fails, this manner of post modern journo inevitably will seek an appropriate authority figure - a fellow traveler if you will - in this case the author relies on one of greatest practitioners of Islamist deception in the U.S., the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR]. Actually we would never had been aware of this column, had it not been widely touted via the CAIR newsletter, represented as some sort of bold strike against religious intolerance.

There is no reason to explore anew the sordid history of CAIR, because the Justice Department, which prosecuted the largest Hamas terror financing case in American history, U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation, did it in a breathtakingly comprehensive manner. [Note: Most of what follows is taken directly from evidentiary materials presented as part of the government's case in the aforementioned Holy Land trial as well as the District Court's response denying CAIR and other American Islamist organizations' petition to be removed from a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case.]

Let's turn back the clock nearly 20 years to the weekend of October 2-3, 1993. Senior American Hamas activists are meeting in a Philadelphia hotel to plan strategy for the group, one of their goals...derailing the Oslo "peace process." Unfortunately for them, the proceedings of the meeting were being wiretapped by the FBI. Future leaders of the organization which came to be known as CAIR were in attendance at the meeting.

Among those present at this 1993 Hamas conclave were Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, [source, evidentiary material, U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation, http://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judges/hlf2/09-29-08/Philly%20Meeting%20Summary.pdf] who would, approximately one year later, create the organization CAIR.

As part of its initial funding CAIR received a $5,000 wire transfer from the Hamas entity the Holy Land Foundation, to help establish CAIR's Washington, DC office.

Those present at this meeting were identified - as shown below [excerpted from a document archived by the Investigative Project on Terrorism] by the FBI in the following manner:

"...The 25 person gathering represented, according to the FBI, 'a meeting...among senior leaders of HAMAS, the LLFRD and the IAP.' A FBI analysis further noted: 'all attendees of this meeting are Hamas members' or sympathizers...'"

[The Origins of CAIR, IPT, http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/109.pdf, referring to HLF document, "FBI Analysis of the Philadelphia Conference, Submitted as an exhibit in Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development v. Ashcroft, 02-442 GK, Exhibit 28 at 1400 (D.D.C)."]

So we must conclude from this evidence that two of the founders of CAIR, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad [still CAIR's Executive Director, source CAIR website, http://www.cair.com/aboutus/cairnationalboardandstaff.aspx#Nihad_Awad] attended a domestic meeting wherein Hamas planned its long-term strategy. One of the decisions made at the conference was that a new organization needed to be created which could better interface with American society "whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous," in their words, absent the obvious radical baggage attendant Hamas. [source, characterization of the new organization, http://counterterrorismblog.org/upload/2007/12/93Phillyfinal%5B1%5D.pdf]

Fast forward to November 2008 when it was announced that all 5 of the Holy Land defendants - Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh and Ghassan Elashi - had been convicted on all counts.

Of note, Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Ghassan Elashi and Mufid Abdulqader were all in attendance at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting, along with two of the founding members of CAIR. Additionally, HLF defendant, Ghassan Elashi, already serving a long sentence in the Hamas-linked Infocom terror prosecution, was a member of the founding board of the Texas chapter of CAIR.

Reeling, not only from the group's association with such a serious terror prosecution including the conviction of one of their own, Ghassan Elashi, CAIR petitioned the U.S. District Court, North Dallas, to remove its name from the list of fellow travelers/co-conspirators, in an effort to preserve what remained of the organization's now tattered reputation.

From the decision:

"ISNA and NAIT, in fact, shared more with HLF than just a parent organization.They were intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financialsupport to HAMAS. Shortly after HAMAS was founded in 1987, as an outgrowth of theMuslim Brotherhood, Govt. Exh. 21-61, the International Muslim Brotherhood orderedthe Muslim Brotherhood chapters throughout the world to create Palestine Committees,whose job it was to support HAMAS with media, money and men." Govt. Exh. 3-15.The U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood created the U.S. Palestine Committee, which documentsreflect was initially comprised of three organizations: the OLF (HLF), the IAP, and theUASR. CAIR was later added to these organizations. Govt. Exh. 3-78 (listing IAP,HLF, UASR and CAIR as part of the Palestine Committee, and stating that there is [n]odoubt America is the ideal location to train the necessary resources to support theMovement worldwide . . ."). The mandate of these organizations, per the InternationalMuslim Brotherhood, was to support HAMAS, and the HLFs particular role was to raisemoney to support HAMAS organizations inside the Palestinian territories. Govt. Exh. 3-17 (objective of the Palestine Committee is to support HAMAS)." [source, ACLU, http://www.aclu.org/images/asset_upload_file142_36171.pdf]

There was more evidence linking CAIR with Hamas as shown in this related court document:

"As of the date of this response, the Court has entered into evidence a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking CAIR and its founders to the HLF and its principals; the Islamic Association of Palestine and its principals; the Palestine Committee in the United States, headed by Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook; and the greater Hamas-affiliated conspiracy described in the Governments case-in-chief. See, e.g., Government Exhibits 3-1, 3-12, 3-15, 3-17, 3-75,3-85, 4-1, 5-130, 5-131, 5-133 through 5-149, 5-160, 5-161, 11-33, 14-31, 16-3, 16-53,16-63, 17-1." [source, Investigative Project on Terrorism, http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/479.pdf]

So the above is the Council on American Islamic Relations - in black and white - stripped bare of its rhetoric. Only in a society which has slipped its moorings could such a group be characterized as a moderate "civil rights" organization.

Bringing this full circle, the Village Voice's Robbins is by no means the only writer who continues to rely on CAIR as the go to organization when soliciting input on matters pertaining to Islam. Nearly every American media entity including the networks and cable news outlets, yes Fox News too, have been similarly irresponsible. When the studio lights go on we see CAIR mouthpieces cooing about their respect and devotion to American values, pluralism and cooperation with law enforcement on matters of national security.

A public service message from your friends at CAIR

But when the lights are struck and the set goes dim, the enemies of the West revert to form, urging that a "Wall of Resistance" be built between the Muslim community and the organizations whose job it is to protect American security - primarily against the actions of Islamic fundamentalists.

Ignorance of the menace which groups like CAIR pose is no longer a valid excuse, the information necessary to nail them to their wall of resistance is omnipresent. Those who continue to work with these discredited organizations are meekly adopting the behavioral role prescribed for them as conquered non-Muslim populations under Shari'a. They have surrendered, become dhimmis, pathetic second class citizens, too fearful of breaking the self imposed and deadly silence their secular demi-religion demands.

Note, those interested in further research can take advantage of an extraordinarily rich archive, maintained by the Dallas District Court, with links to key pieces of evidence in U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation, the trial that finally outed some of the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front groups operating in America - HLF Evidentiary Archive

March 25, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In an official 2009 document prepared by Catholic Charities USA [see, http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=1924] the organization details its activities, including expenditures as well as income, in that calendar year.

For those not intimately familiar with the workings of this national social welfare group, the amount of funding it has to work with might come as a surprise, $4,270,309,450, a lot of money no matter how one looks at it.

Even more revelatory, of the $4.2B dollar amount, fully 67% comes from the government. That means that nearly $3B of the total, 2 out of every 3 dollar received is dependent upon the largesse of the fed and provided, I think it would be safe to say, without the full knowledge of hard-strapped American taxpayers.

There are a number of reasons why this information is important, primarily because of the potentially corrosive, morally corruptive effect it might have upon Catholic policy makers.

1. That the Church has primarily, over the last few generations especially, steadily increased its political activity, under the guise of "Social Justice," and that the majority component of this political activism is slanted in a hard-left philosophical direction, we believe in a manner inconsistent with any reasonable construction of traditional Catholic theology.

2. That despite the undeniably pro-life rhetoric coming out of the American Catholic Bishops' executive body, the USCCB, the organization has adamantly refused to even take a position on efforts to defund America's single largest provider of abortion, Planned Parenthood.

The contrast in funding levels between PP and Catholic Charities is marked, with the former receiving approximately $350M/year and the latter upwards of $2.8B.

In searching for the disconnect on the part of the USCCB between its stated values on this matter and its actions [or more correctly, its lack of action] the issue of funding looms large.

It seems entirely possible, if not probable, that the hand of official Catholic activism which might prove pivotal in halting the flow of federal funds to the PP abortion mill, has been stayed by fear of it being removed from its place on the government teat in a similar manner.

We are, of course not advancing a position which conflates the morally repugnant actions of PP with the goodness of the charitable work carried out by Catholic Charities, but the enemies of the Church, the doctrinaire leftists would undoubtedly try to make that very case, unleashing a firestorm of criticism [which the MSM would be all over] that would undoubtedly provide considerable impetus in support of the sentiment that if one is defunded, so should the other - despite their vastly differing moral value.

This logic is certainly not wasted in the ivory towers of USCCB, these are learned men and they certainly can connect these rather obvious dots.

What may however be lacking in USCCB's calculus, is now that the Pence [R, IN] legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, has passed the House, and is on its way to the Senate, the leftist establishment will without doubt go gunning for Catholic Charities regardless of the outcome of Mr. Pence's efforts. [Please note: the defunding of the National Public Broadcasting Company, only hastens such a potential outcome]

The Church has a lot to lose, not all of it of a monetary nature.

The receipt of this level of taxpayer funded largesse which flows into the Catholic bureaucracy, we must surmise, has created a morally corrosive conflict of interest - it's hush money which silences the Church on one of the key aspects of its moral teaching, for fear of upsetting the apple-cart.

As a likely result, the USCCB has abdicated it role as moral leader, cowering behind the considerable stacks of greenbacks which it receives from Uncle Barack.

We suggest a different and winning strategy for USCCB and its Catholic Charities ministry, one which doesn't reek of moral turpitude.

The USCCB should stay true to its dogma, and do everything in its power [it has an undeniably formidable lobbying ability, witness its role in the passage of ObamaCare, similarly an area of concern] to assist the U.S. Senate in understanding the morally correct position of defunding Planned Parenthood, while at the same time affirmatively making the case to define the services provided by Catholic Charities as being ethically admirable and let the chips fall where they may.

If things remain as they currently are, if the Bishops allow themselves to be blackmailed into silence then perhaps while keeping their blood money, they will take a hit to their continued credibility that, on top of the scandals with which the Church is already dealing, is so massive their teaching authority on all matters may be permanently blackened.

One harkens back to the persecution of third century Christians by Roman emperor Diocletian, in which entire families were exterminated, in ghastly fashion, in public spectacles of unimaginable horror. These disciples suffered greatly for their faith, is the potential loss of a few bucks by an organization which is already quite wealthy, worth destroying that tradition?

The ball is clearly in your court gentlemen, make the Catholic laity proud.

Bigoted Dutch Muslim Leader Claims Geert Wilders, "Is In The Service Of Israel"

By BEILA RABINOWITZ

March 24, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The head of the National Council of Moroccans in Holland, Mohamed Rabbae, is claiming that a prominent politician is essentially a political agent of Israel, "Wilders is a racist in the service of Israel," he stated in an interview during a rally in Amsterdam supposedly against discrimination. Rabbae is one of the Muslims who is suing Wilders for discrimination and religious bigotry. [Translated from the Dutch, a video of the interview can be accessed here, http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/9344556/___Wilders_is_racist_in_dienst_van_Isral___.html?p=19,2]

According to Elsevier magazine, Rabbae sees Wilders as the instrument of an Israeli conspiracy to drive Muslims from Europe. Wilders responded in the same publication, stating that "Rabbae's remarks are proof of unprecedented foolishness and nonsense. Let's leave it at that" [source, Elsevier, translated from the Dutch, http://www.elsevier.nl/web/Nieuws/Politiek/292664/Mohamed-Rabbae-Wilders-is-instrument-van-Israel.htm]

Moroccan youth are responsible for numerous attacks on Jews in Holland, causing many to flee the country. In a December 2010 interview prominent VVD politician, Frits Bolkestein, advised religious Jews to emigrate from Holland due to "the anti-Semitism of Dutchmen of Moroccan descent whose numbers keep growing." [source, [source, http://www.rnw.nl/english/bulletin/no-future-dutch-orthodox-jews%E2%80%99

Rabbae's anti-Semitic remarks are indicative of the mindset of many of his co-religionist countrymen. That he has made such intemperate remarks himself while being allowed to participate in a lawsuit against Wilders, alleging what amounts to a Shari'a based charge of blasphemy, is a scathing indictment of the Dutch legal system. It is a clear demonstration that Muslims have been made a protected class and are being held to different standards than non-Muslims. The incongruity of such a proceeding seems lost on many Dutchmen and their European neighbors, unfortunately it appears to be just the most recent case of perverse multiculturalism run amok.

Today's bloody attacks, building on the atrocity just a few weeks ago, where a family was butchered by Hamas, are bound to cause a major shake-up in Israel's thinking regarding its policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the viability of a "Palestinian State."

Such a reassessment is far past due; it's clear that the so-called peace process has not only failed but emboldened the Islamist enemy whose only goal is the total destruction of the Jewish state.

March 22, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In discussing this matter we must leave aside the craven hypocrisy of a claimed anti-interventionist [who, along with the Dem leadership, actively sought the defeat of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan...uhhh before he had to...well...take responsibility for the consequences of his actions] turning a poverty stricken, godforsaken, but sovereign Middle Eastern county [with oil] into a shooting gallery. The left owns this territory so thoroughly, no explanation is needed.

Now it is a given that Muammar Gadhafi is a despot [arguably certifiable and in desperate need of a new couturier], a terrorist and an enabler of terrorism. None of this is really news in his neighborhood.

One would have thought given Mr. Obama's heated and irresponsible rhetoric regarding the military conflicts in which America was then and is still currently involved, that barring an extreme act of provocation, attacking Libya would not rank very high on his to-do list.This of course makes a big assumption, that TeamObama actually has the level of focus necessary to think about international relations in such an ordered manner.

So the attack is simply inexplicable and we believe indefensible.

Below ten quick reasons - in no particular order - why this action should never have been seriously contemplated, let alone carried out.

1. Libya poses no national threat to us [or any signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization], many other countries do but we don't bomb them with no provocation, we don't even go out of our way to say harsh things about the worst of them in public. Dozens upon dozens of countries abuse their citizens, it's the rule not the exception throughout the world and by the standards of the machete brutality constantly on display in places like Africa, Gadhafi is a candidate to baby sit your kids. There are fleets of pirates operating off the coast of Somalia who have recently murdered Americans...were their villages leveled with cruise missiles? If so, the news never made the NY Times.

2. There was zero consultation about the matter with Congress before taking this precipitous step, it was essentially presented to them [and of course lapped up by the pitiable bozos masquerading as the GOP leadership] as a fait accompli.

3. Any action "authorized," by the U.N., and signed off by Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice is by definition a bad idea.

4. Libya, unlike Iraq has not demonstrated an immediate military threat to its neighbors or the stability of the surrounding countries.

5. Mr. Obama's real motivation seems to be for reasons external to U.S. national security needs, primarily it seems designed to satisfy demands for Gadhafi's ouster by the Arab League and the United Nations, which in a sane world would be the instant kiss of death.

6. We actually have no idea who these "rebels" are, though the leadership most prominently mentioned were recently part of the Libyan government we are now seeking to replace. Over the last few days it does seem that these "freedom fighters," have picked up the endorsement of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [formerly, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat], the North African al-Qaeda franchise. So who knows? Perhaps to the twisted bunch currently operating out of the State Department, the al-Qaeda imprimatur identifies the rebels as authentic Muslims, thus sanctifying their cause.

7. We have taken none of the dizzying array of diplomatic steps even marginally comparable to those engaged in by Bush 1 and 2 to provide some level of certitude that these actions were necessary. Obama's flaccid Libyan coalition doesn't approach the 40 or so countries, which signed on the dotted line in Iraq.

8. Attacking a sovereign nation, absent provocation is an act of war no matter how you slice it. Further complicating this already creaky equation, the administration is internally conflicted about the goal, the length of the engagement and by what metric we will be able to determine that the "job" is done. Exit policy? Are you kidding, let's talk NCAA round ball instead.

9. The action screams "clueless foreign policy," to anyone listening, though it just might be a case of Obama needing a testosterone boost, deciding to try on George W's tough guy boots

10. What if this adventure fails...miserably and amidst the carnage and recrimination, Gadhafi manages to stay in power, then what? This is the equivalent of shaking the hornet's nest from the interior of a locked closet.

The Libyan action is a roll-of -the-die act of madness and Mr. Obama and this country will come to regret it.

Late breaking note: The WH is circulating a new talking point in defense of its Libyan exercise, that it was all the while designed to send a strong message to Iran, which TeamObama's Einsteins have deduced might have been emboldened by all of the recent turmoil in the ME, much of it aided and abetted by this administration. If this is the case, that the current national security team have intended lighting up the Libyan sky like a Fourth of July celebration to serve as a warning to Iran they are more clueless than even the most pessimistic of observers might have thought.

Why use Libya as a proxy? It's like beating up a sickly two year old, hoping that his thuggish linebacker big brother will tremble in fear and run away. Seen in that light, the incursion is provocative in the extreme, more evidence that these folks are truly lost in a geopolitical world which they seem ideologically incapable of grasping.

How Do You Collectivize Education? One Bill At A Time

HOW FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATS ARE PLANNING YOUR FUTURE

By CAMILLE GIGLIO

March 21, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Much is being written about the changes and reforms being planned in education. Every special interest group, government agency, union, community nonprofit and mega business seemingly has its own plan for the education of our students. The classroom and its outcome or end product has become an extension of big business' planning department. People such as Bill and Melinda Gates think they can already predict many workers will be needed in various industries at specific points in the future.

This is nothing short of the collectivization of education, already a government monopoly, to produce a society deemed appropriate by the social engineers.

The federal government is in the process of analyzing its various departments to determine how many future employees will need to graduate with the proper credentials to fill positions. President Obama has been quoted as stating that the federal government needs the best and brightest of the future students and he has spent his time visiting some of the potential role-model schools for producing those future leaders of bureaucracy - meet Big Brother.

Primary and secondary schools have geared up to provide physical and mental health care, scientifically correct nutrition in the form of breakfasts, lunches and after-school snacks, physical education and lifestyle supportive services with a little academics on the side.

Now the U.S. Department of Education overseers, with the gleeful assistance of Congress and our California state legislators, are turning toward the postsecondary schools: the junior colleges, [Oops, pardon me, community colleges] state colleges and university system, to bring their educational programs in line with the new purpose of education.

How many times, in the last two years, have you heard or read media reports quoting some tax funded or governmental group's spokesperson claiming that everybody has a right to an education and that tomorrow's well prepared worker will need a college degree? Or, at the least, they assert that two years at a community college is the bare minimum requirement.

Sure, it makes sense, in a way. If educators have striven to guide our youth through schools in order to produce a pre-planned outcome, those efforts must not be lost as the student transitions over to the college or university system. By the way, "transitions" is one of the new academic buzz words. One does not graduate anymore; they transition to another level of continuous learning - life-long learning, as it is now called. Some will take longer to transition than others but it will be a smooth process from pre-K to grade 12 and maybe even a college degree of some sort.

In 1960, then-State Senator George Miller Jr. [father of our current Congressman George Miller] authored a bill creating a plan to organize California's higher education goals. It was originally titled the California Master Plan for Higher Education, but was renamed the Donahoe Higher Education Act, in honor of Margaret Donahoe, a former state legislator.

This rather short, concise bill provided for the following:

1. The creation of a Coordinating Council for Higher Education overseeing the coordination of junior [sic] colleges, state colleges and the University system, endowing it with the authority to acquire new sites for institutions of higher learning or to prohibit any new sites.

2. Assigned the University of California as the "primary state-supported academic agency for research."

3. Assigned a Board of 20 elected legislative officials and appointed trustees to oversee the state college system and set the terms of office.

4. It further stated in very definite language that, "The State College System shall be entirely independent of all political and sectarian influence and kept free there from in the appointment of its trustees and in the administration of its affairs." It further declared that "no person shall be debarred admission to any department of the state colleges on account of sex."

5. Junior colleges shall continue to be a part of the public school system through the 14th grade level. Instruction shall include, but not be limited to: standard collegiate courses for transfer to higher institutions, vocational and technical fields leading to employment and general or liberal arts courses.

6. The final and lengthiest chapter of the bill defined the purpose, composition of and scope of authority and reimbursement for services of the Coordinating Council for Higher Education.

There is not one word in this bill about regulating what is taught in the higher education programs except to state very clearly that this level of education was not to be used for the advancement of political or sectarian agendas.

Too bad the legislators couldn't leave it that way.

In 1999 an amendment was added to the act expanding the concept of higher education to include training in preparation for and fulfillment of the requirements of federal workforce development laws started under the Clinton Regime. This gives new meaning to the phrase "No Child Left Behind."

This term, California legislators have authored at least 14 bills amending and expanding the areas of interest contained in the Education Master Plan for Higher Education. They have little to do with academic education and everything to do with promoting some group's special interest. Thirteen bills are authored by Democrats and one by a Republican. Every one of the 13 bills reflects a political or sectarian special interest.

The effect of these bills would be to significantly expand the role of higher education as a further extension of the behavior modification programs in the primary and secondary school system, transitioning hand-picked students right from school into the waiting arms of the industrial/global community of workers.

In very general terms, students of the near future are to be continually assessed from the time they enter school to determine what function they should have within the global community. Their educational course of studies will be determined by third parties. This is the meaning of School-to-Work. Some will be prepared to assume their place in the community of workers immediately following high school. Others will be encouraged to transition on to community college for a certain level of employment designated to help sustain the local community. Sort of today's middle management classification.

Those transitioning on to a 4-year college would be those deemed worthy of higher positions within the general community or level of government. The university-trained students would be considered for positions of national or global leadership.

Whether your child is chosen for government or private-sector work, the employer, both in this country and abroad, will be assured the future employee has been given the politically correct training needed to produce a compliant, conforming, obedient worker who will recognize and accept that his worth depends upon his ability to be productive for the continuing good of society.

The student, while progressing through school, will be in a constant situation of competition with other students across the globe for the opportunity to advance and continue to be accepted in the level of education mapped out for him or her.

Now, this brings up the question of equal opportunity in education  or equity, as it is often stated. If a student is to be continually competitive on a local, national or global level the requirements for the competition must be equal. This requires education to be exactly the same everywhere or else, as the liberals like to cry, it isn't fair.

This is why the national department of education has never been dismantled as President Reagan had promised. This is why education seems to be dumbed-down, as some like to call it. No one can be allowed to advance beyond someone else, which often results in the use of the lowest common denominator.

Here is a sampling of some of the more egregious pieces of California legislation amending or adding to the Donahoe Higher Education Act, awaiting hearings:

AB 130/AB 131 both authored by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, titled Student Financial Aid: Eligibility: Dream Act of 2011. These bills would give in-state tuition to illegal alien children if they have been enrolled in California schools for one out of three concurrent years.

This bill has already had one hearing. Assembly member Tim Donnolly, [R], a member of the Assembly Appropriations Committee was so outraged at the groups coming before his committee in support of this bill and demanding the right to have access to higher education, that he authored AB 26, Illegal Immigrants, as a counter measure.

Bills such as AB 130/131 are what makes higher education so expensive and takes ever more taxpayer funding because the students who would benefit will not be paying for this education, you, the taxpayer will be paying. Here is a list of the supporters of these two bills:American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, California Catholic Conference, California Communities United Institute, [this is the group listed in the Steinberg bill SB611, as being created by that bill], California Federation of Teachers, California Immigrant Policy Center, California Teachers Association, Community College League of California, Equality California, Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, Peralta Community College District, Service Employees International Union, California University of California

The following bills have not had their first hearing yet so there are no supporters or opponents listed at this time.

AB 620 by Marty Block, titled Postsecondary Education: Nondiscrimination. The author claims that there is something within the Donahoe Higher Education Plan called the Equity in Higher Education Act, which demands that the definition of gender be expanded to include gender self identity meaning the Gay and Lesbian and transgendered special interest community. This reference to gender self identity is contained within SB 48 by Sen. Mark Leno, soon to be heard in its first committee.

SB 760 by Senator Elaine Alquist, titled Donahoe Higher Education Act. This is a Spot Bill meaning that it has very little content and was submitted in order to hold a spot open on the legislative calendar to be used later. This bill would seek to amend that portion of the Education Master Plan exempting private colleges and universities from the requirements of the [1960] Master Plan and, instead, bring these schools into compliance with the state Master Plan demands for Higher Education.

SB 611 by Senator Darrell Steinberg, titled Postsecondary Education: University of California. This changes the mission and role of the 1960's-created Board of Trustees. It sets up a University of California Integration Institute - UCCII - http://www.ucop.edu/ucci/ integrating the Career Technical Education Program within the university setting.

This places the university system squarely into the hands of the federally controlled workforce development program creating advisory boards or partnerships with businesses. This creates a smooth, seamless transition from pre-K through high school to college right into the workplace.

Of course this will all be accomplished with the compliance of the parents who will be overjoyed, according to the thinking of the planners, to see that the state has been a good provider for their children's future.

AB 1237 by Brian Nestande, [R-Riverside] entitled Postsecondary Education: Funding. This bill is an attempt to counter or prohibit changes to the funding segment of the Donahoe Higher Education Master Plan and would: "state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation to prohibit the use of state funds for remedial coursework at the University of California and California State University."

With the current makeup of the state legislature there is a simple majority of Democrats in both the assembly and the senate. Bills that do not carry large appropriations of money require only a simple majority for passage. All of these bills are slated for hearings in their respective house's education committee. Every committee has a majority of Democrats over Republicans. Unless the legislators hear from their constituents in large numbers, there is no way to stop these bills from going through to a final floor vote and ending up on the governor's desk for his signature.

Iran, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Interesting Revelations by "Wikileaks"

By EMERSON VERMAAT

March 21, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - It was on February 5, 2011, that British Special Forces (SAS) in Afghanistan seized a convoy of 48 powerful Iranian rockets destined for Taliban fighters. (The story leaked to the press one month later, though). "The 122mm rockets have twice the range and twice the blast radius of the Taliban's more commonly used 107mm missiles and have not been seen in action against NATO forces for the past four years," The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported on March 9. "The rockets have a range of more than 12 miles and shower shrapnel to a radius of nearly 100 feet." British Foreign Secretary William Hague was quoted as saying: "I am extremely concerned by the latest evidence that Iran continues to supply the Taliban with weaponry  weapons clearly intended to provide the Taliban with the capability to kill Afghan and ISAF soldiers from a significant range."

It was by no means the first time that the radical Iranian Shia regime supplied weapons to the Sunni Taliban terrorists. They did so on numerous occasions before, for example in 2007 when NATO forces discovered Iranian anti-tank grenades in the Western Afghan province of Farah. And on December 18, 2010, an officer of the elite Al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was captured by US special forces in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan. He was described as "a key Taliban weapons facilitator.'"

Wikileaks documents (leaked US Embassy cables) clearly show continued Iranian military and political support to the Taliban. This is a matter of grave concern to US diplomats, the State Department and the Department of Defense. This issue was raised with Afghan president Hamid Karzai by US Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman on November 7, 2007. "Edelman asked how best to deal with Iran. The explosively-formed projectile weapons (EFPs) intercepted by British troops are worrying; even small numbers, if effectively employed against a small Ally such as the Dutch, could have a strategic effect. EFPs have been a major cause of US casualties in Iraq. Reports of MANPADS (man-potable air-defense systems, V.) coming out of Iran are also of concern. Recalling his conversation with Karzai in March on Iran, Edelman said Iranian meddling is getting increasingly lethal. He appreciated this was a complicated issue and that Afghanistan wants to avoid a two-front war, but Iranian actions, if not checked, will result in a two-front war in any event. We need to work together to put the Iranians back on their heels, adding that the USG (US Government, V.) is implementing new financial sanctions on the IRGC Quds Force. Iranian lethal assistance to the Taliban must be stopped before it reaches the levels of similar assistance to insurgents in Iraq.'

According to another Wikileaks document a man named Omar Daudzai, president Karzai's chief of staff, had what was described as "a frank conversation" in early 2010 with US Embassy officials. He said "that the Iranians no longer even bother to deny their support for the Taliban." "Iran would even support Sunni Taliban to counter Western influence in Afghanistan, so long as the Taliban factions they supported were not affiliated with Mullah Omar." (The former Taliban "chief of state" who allied himself with Osama bin Laden until the Al-Qaeda leader managed to escape to Pakistan's Tribal Areas in December 2001 where he supposedly still is; the whereabouts of Mullah Omar are currently unknown.)

"Daudzai said that two years ago when he raised with the Iranians their support for Afghan Taliban, they had flatly denied any involvement. However, over the past half year, the Iranians, including their Ambassador in Kabul, no longer deny this assertion  now they remain silent, he said. Daudzai attributed the Iran change in posture to their awareness that the GIRoA (Government Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, V.) has evidence of Iranian support for some Taliban elements." "Daudzai said that on occasion young Afghan males are allowed to cross into Iran, where they are recruited and trained before returning to Afghanistan to fight against the GIRoA and Coalition Forces."

A Sunday Times reporter interviewed two Taliban commanders who visited secret Iranian training camps. One of them claimed: "Our religions and our histories are different, but our target is the same  we both want to kill Americans." (Iranians as well as Taliban are Muslims, but the former are Shias whereas the latter are Sunnis.) "According to one Taliban source, emissaries traveled to Iran last year (i.e. in 2009, V.) to discuss a training program with Iranian officials. The training began during the winter. "Iran paid for the whole trip. We paid the travel fees to begin with and once we got to Iran they refunded us," one of the commanders said. "They paid for our food, our mobile phone cards, any expenses." It was a three months' training course. Iranian instructors told the Afghan Taliban how to launch complex ambushes on moving convoys, how to plant deadly roadside bombs and how to storm fixed enemy positions. "Both commanders said Iran also supplied them with weapons, often paying nomads to smuggle ammunition, mines and guns accoss the desert and mountain passes between Iran and Afghanistan's Western provinces." (The Sunday Times article was published well before the Wikileaks documents were put on the Internet.)

Bribing and recruiting religious scholars and politicians

Back, therefore, to these interesting Wikileaks revelations. Omar Daudzai, Karzai's chief of staff, further told US Embassy officials that "the Iranians also recruit Afghan university students and graduates. Daudzai said that approximately 7,000 Afghans hold Iranian university degrees, including three of President Karzai's cabinet picks, who 'fortunately' Parliament did not confirm. He claimed that Iran is also offering three-year visas to Afghans who deposit USD 100,000 in an Iranian account."

"Iran grooms thousands of Afghan religious scholars. After completing their education in Iran, they return to Afghanistan to work in Madrassas, where they continue to receive 'support packages' from Iran. The support package included a monthly salary. Daudzai claimed that a man named Ibrahim directed this program from the Supreme Leader's office. (Iran's so-called "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier and a notorious human rights violator, V.) Daudzai "also asserted that in addition to financing Afghan relgious leaders, Iran provided salary support for some GIRoA deputy ministers and other officials, including 'one or two even in the (presidential) Palace. Daudzai claimed that some of these officials had been relieved of their duties because 'you can't be an honest Afghan if you receive a (Iran) package.'"

These and other Wikileaks documents show that Iran is bribing Afghan religious scholars, government ministers as well as members of parliament. There were allegations that Iranian spies were bribing Afghan MPs "in a bid to get the Afghan parliament to back 'anti-Coalition policies'," a secret US Embassy cable from Kabul claimed on March 3, 2009. "Some parliamentary staff also believe Iranian intelligence has infiltrated parliament's legal and IT offices. Mirwais Yaseni, the deputy speaker, told US diplomats that he was visited by an Iranian spy who offered him 'support' if he allowed a debate on the legal status of NATO forces in Afghanistan. When he declined, parliament's pro-Iran MPs went ahead anyway."

"Iranian Embassy officials exploit contacts with a number of Afghan politicians to influence Parliament's agenda. Many MPs accuse Hazaras (a Persian speaking Iranic ethnic Shia group living in Central Afghanistan, V.), who like Iran's leaders are mostly Shia Muslims, of having the closest ties with Iran. Moderate Hazaras insist Iranian outreach influences only conservative Hazaras, many of whom received religious educations or lived in Iran while in exile. MPs single out Sayed Hussein Alemi Balkhi (Kabul), Ahmad Ali Jebraili (Herat), and Ustad Mohammed Akbari (Bamyam), as the Hazara MPs who receive the most support from Iran. The Iranian Embassy has also cultivated deep relations with members of opposition groups (including the United Front), Tajik Sayeds, and MPs from Herat and other western provinces."

"Iranian Embassy officers frequently visit Parliament, but rarely sit in the public gallery and usually avoid high-traffic morning hours, according to Parliament watchers. After Iranian-influence allegations exploded a few years ago, the Iranian Embassy began hosting MPs more often at off-site meetings, where other MPs suspect payments are delivered in exchange for commitments to advocate Iranian policies."

"Despite Iran's ambitious lobbying efforts, there are limits to MPs' willingness to toe to the Iranian line. A Lower House debate last November (2008) on water rights quickly struck a nationalistic tone, with several MPs accusing Iran of 'stealing Afghanistan's water.' No MP spoke up to disagree."

Iran and Al-Qaeda: "Your jihad is our jihad"

Former CIA Director George Tenet claims that the CIA learned in mid-2002 "that portions of Al-Qaeda's leadership had relocated to Iran. This became much more problematic, leading to overtures to Iran and eventually face-to-face discussions with Iranian officials in December 2002 and early 2003. Ultimately, the Al-Qaeda leaders in Iran were placed under some kind of house arrest, although the Iranians refused to deport them to their countries of origin." Many of them were not arrested, but put in special safehouses run by the elitist Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Both before and after 9/11 Iran served as a transit route and safe haven for prominent Al-Qaeda members. One of them was Saif Al-Adel, who was involved in the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa and provided military training to Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan. He spent nine years in Iran, before he returned to Waziristan, Pakistan's restive tribal areas, to operate as Al-Qaeda's military chief."Hizbi Islami" leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (Hikmatyar) fled to Iran in 1996 where he lived for 6 years. It was there that he tried to build bridges between Iran, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The common denominator between them was that they were staunch opponents of the United States. It was shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan at end of 2001 that a group of thirty Al-Qaeda fighters traveled to Iran. One of them, a Saudi national, later claimed: "We were aware that Afghani leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who resided in Iran (at that time), was acting as an intermediary and liaison between us and Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Hekmatyar promised us accomodation in the border city of Zehdan (in southeastern Iran), where the majority of the residents are Baluchi Sunnis. There we met with Al-Qaeda commander Abu Hafs Al-Mauritani, who had earlier opposed the September 11 attacks. (Al-Mauritani) assured us that we were in a safe place, and that we would be questioned by Iranian intelligence services in Tehran, who would provide for all our needs during our stay in Iran."

An Iranian intelligence officer tried to recruit him, saying: "You and us, we are both fighting the same enemy. The American (enemy), as well as everyone who supports him and helps him to remain in the region. Your jihad is our jihad, and a joint jihad operation of this kind is incumbent upon us all." "(You will receive) a monthly salary of $ 10,000, an Iranian passport, and military training with Hezbollah in Lebanon." The Al-Qaeda member in question claims he refused the offer. Other Al-Qaeda members, though, may have been lured into the Iranian trap. This story sounds quite credible, also what is being said about the role of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a "global terrorist" with $ 25 million on his head.

Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa, a former governor of Herat Province and currently a Guantánamo Bay (Gitmo) detainee, served as the Taliban's liasion to Iran. He personally knew Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Khairkhwa "and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami Gulbuddin Hikmatyar faction officials," says a document from the US government's unclassified files on Gitmo detainees. "Present at the meeting were Afghan Hizbi Islami Gulbuddin leader, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. (Bin Laden's deputy, V.) Topics of the discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan and strengthening the Taliban's ties with Iran government." (Khairkhwa admitted "there was a meeting with the Taliban delegation on Iran's soil," but denied there were "Gulbuddin representatives.") After the 9/11 attacks, in November 2001 that is, the document claims Khairkhwa "met with an Iranian diplomatic mission. The Iranian government was prepared to offer anti-aircraft weapons to the Taliban for use against the United States and coalition forces operating in Afghanistan." Khairkhwa denied this, saying: "This never happened. This talk took place in the first meeting." Presiding officer: "The meeting in January 2000?" Detainee (Khairkhwa): "It only happened in the first meeting. The Iranians offered to buy weapons for us because we were on restriction and could not buy them. That is the truth." He did not deny Al-Zawahiri was there.

Although the questioning of a number of Gitmo detainees took place under dubious circumstances, the above statement could very well be a true version of events. It is, at least, quite plausible, and "this talk," as Khairkhwa called it, did probably take place, either in January 2000 or in November 2001, and Zawahiri could have been there (in Iran), too.

Zawahiri's possible visit to Iran is confirmed by another source, an Iranian defector. In his book Countdown to Crisis, New York Times bestselling author Kenneth R. Timmerman quotes Iranian defector Hamid Reza Zakeri who "walked into the US Embassy in Baku on July 26, 2001." Zakeri was working for the newly formed Intelligence Office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He "handled security arrangements for the nation's top leaders and most senior intelligence operators," Timmerman writes. "That is how he got to meet Osama bin Laden's chief deputy, Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden's eldest son, Saad. 'I organized the security for their meetings,' Zakeri told me." Zakeri claimed that "Zawahiri came to Iran in early 2001." "He had been coming to Iran for more than a decade." This is not conflicting with Khairkhwa's statement that Zawahiri visited Iran in January 2000. He may have visited Iran twice, but there is no evidence that he made frequent visits to that country, as Zakeri and Timmerman assert. Timmerman further claims that both Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden visited Iran in late 2004. But this was not based on Zakeri's information as the former Iranian intelligence officer defected in 2001. Timmerman only refers to unspecified "sources with direct knowledge of these meetings." There is no evidence that Zawahiri or Bin Laden visited Iran in December 2004. Indeed, it is not very likely they did.

A secret Iranian May 2001 memorandum on cooperation with Al-Qaeda: Is it authentic?

Zakeri claims he showed the CIA a memorandum from Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, the Director of the (Supreme) Leader's Intelligence Organization. It was addressed to Moustapha Pourghanad, the Director of Section 43 of MOIS (Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security). The Memorandum, dated May 14, 2001, is also reprinted and translated into English in Timmerman's book. It is, Timmerman claims, "laying out the guidelines established by the Supreme Leader (Ali Khamenei, V.) for joint operations with Al-Qaeda." (Nateq Nouri is a former Iranian Interior Minister and former parliamentary speaker and became the Director of the Supreme Leader's Intelligence Organization in 2001, V.) The memorandum "was the equivalent of a Presidential Decision Directive in the United States, the top-secret documents that guide policy makers in developing specific operational plans," Timmerman writes. "In the memorandum, written in Persian, Nateq Nouri says that Khamenei personally has seen the latest report 'regarding support and help for the future plan' of Al-Qaeda. Any attack, Khamenei ordered, must 'strike at (America's) economic structure, their reputation and their internal peace and security.' 'Our emphasis should be on the struggle with the Great Satan and Israel,' Khamenei said. 'This is our main agenda.'" "In closing the letter, Nateq Nouri instructed MOIS to work to 'improve our plans, especially in coordination with fighters of Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah to find one objective that is beneficial to both sides.' Above all, he stressed, 'the Leader mentioned that we should limit our relations with Al-Qaeda to just two people as before  Imad Mugniyeh and Ayman Al-Zawahiri  and deal only with them.'"

"We need to set aside our ideological differences," the memorandum further says, "and analyse the problems that would hamper us from reaching our goal. In particular, we should examine the expansion and coordination with Al-Qaeda (Shabbakeh) group and Hezbollah to reach our common objective."

Who was Imad Mugniyeh? He was a senior Hezbollah terrorist who was killed on February 12, 2008 by a car bomb. "He is the most dangerous terrorist we've ever faced," says former CIA operative Robert Baer. "He's a pathological murderer." "He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983." (Beirut barracks and US Embassy bombings.)

It was on October 20, 2000, that Ali Mohamed, a U.S. citizen of Egyptian origin and a former operative of Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad Organization, confirmed in a plea bargain that Al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Al-Jihad Organization were in touch with Iran. He also mentioned Iman Mugniyeh who, so he claimed, met Osama bin Laden, when the latter was still in Sudan: "I was aware of certain contacts between Al-Qaeda and Al-jihad Organization, on one side, and Iran and Hezbollah (an Iranian terrorist group) on the other side. I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between Imad Mugniyeh, Hezbollah's chief, and bin Laden. (Mugniyeh had masterminded the 1983 attack on US marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 US soldiers.). Hezbollah provided explosives training for Al-Qaeda. Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons I was involved in the (Egyptian) Islamic Jihad Organization, and the Islamic Jihad Organization had very close links to Al-Qaeda." (This group would, at Zawahiri's instigation, merge with Al-Qaeda in 1998, with Zawahiri subsequently being promotedd to Osama bin Laden's deputy, a position he has held ever since.)

I do not know if Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri's memorandum is authentic, but I do not rule it out either. However, the memorandum does not prove that Iran was directly implicated in the 9/11 plot, as Timmerman and Zakeri assert. It only shows that there is some form of cooperation between fighters of Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda and that ideological differences must be set aside. This is in line with what Ali Mohamed, Khairkhwa and the above mentioned Al-Qaeda member who received the lucrative Iranian offer of a $ 10,000 monthly salary and receive military training from Hezbollah.

Concluding comments: do not exaggerate

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also believes that Iran is training Al-Qaeda operatives. He writes: "In her recent book The Surge, the American military historian Kimberley Kagan describes how over time Al-Qaeda and Iran began to work together to unhinge the fragile democratic structures in Iraq. According to her account, by the middle of 2007, Iran was both funding and training Al-Qaeda operatives. On several occasions from April through to July 2007, the Americans tried to reach out to Iran to get an accomodation. The Iranians talked happily. But their actions didn't change."

It is undeniable that Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah were and still are cooperating with each other. The 9/11 Commission report, which goes, inter alia, into "Assistance from Hezbollah and Iran to Al-Qaeda," says: "Senior managers in Al-Qaeda maintained contacts with Iran and the Iranian-supported worldwide terrorist organization Hezbollah which is based mainly in southern Lebanon and Beirut. Al-Qaeda members received advice and training from Hezbollah." "Intelligence indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and and senior Al-Qaeda figures after bin Laden's return to Afghanistan. Khallad (a high level Al-Qaeda operative currently in Guantánamo Bay, V.) has said that Iran made a concerted effort to strengthen relations with Al-Qaeda after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, but was rebuffed because bin Laden did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia." The Iranians followed the "practice of not stamping Saudi passports." That is "why several of the 9/11 hijackers (at least eight, according to Binalshibh) transited Iran on their way to or from Afghanistan." (In Afghanistan they met Osama bin Laden and received further instructions regarding the 9/11 plot.) Ramzi Binalshibh, although a Yemeni citizen, also traveled via Iran. He was a key Al-Qaeda operative in the 9/11 plot.

But we should not exaggerate Iran's role in Al-Qaeda. When Zakeri claims that "the Iranian intelligence service was really behind the 9/11 attacks and had employed Al-Qaeda to carry them out," we do need more evidence. "We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attacks," the 9/11 Commission Report says. The principal architect of the 9/11 attacks was, the report reiterates, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He cooperated closely with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key member of the Hamburg Al-Qaeda cell led by Mohammed Atta. Binalshibh traveled to Afghanistan via Iran, a normal route for many Al-Qaeda operatives.

There is no evidence either that Osama bin Laden ever visited Iran. He could have been in touch with Hezbollah when he was still in Sudan (between 1992-1996). Ali Mohammed's assertion that bin Laden met senior Hezbollah operative Imad Mugniyeh sounds credible. Bin Laden's deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri could have paid several visits to Iran. As a former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad Organization he was also in touch with Hezbollah  and Hezbollah may have paved the way for later visits to Iran. But there is no evidence that the Iranians co-conspired with him with respect to the 9/11 plot.

Recent findings show that Iran once again actively tries to court and recruit Al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives  in line with the dictum: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Keep in mind, however, that the Iranian regime is not monolithic. Ali Alfoneh, a resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute, shows in a recent interesting article in the Middle East Quaterly that there are rivalries and frictions between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There is a "troubled relationship" between them. Such rivalries and frictions were also common in Nazi Germany where the top leadership was deeply divided, and where "Supreme Leader" Aldof Hitler had to mediate between the rivals for power, or play one top Nazi off against the other.

Emerson Vermaat is an investigative reporter in the Netherlands specialized in terrorism and crime. Website: emersonvermaat.com.

George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm. My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), p. 244.

Al-Qaeda Member's Account of his Stay in Iran, MEMRI/Free Republic, November 9, 2007.

Spiegelonline (Germany), October 25, 2010 ("Saif Al-Adel back in Waziristan: A top terrorist returns to Al-Qaida fold").James Fergusson, Taliban. The true story of the world's most feared guerrilla fighters (London: Bantam Press, 2010), p. 239 ("Hekmatyar, a 'global terrorist' with $ 25 million on his head...")

The U.S. Conference Of Catholic Bishops' Dereliction Of Duty On Pro Life Matters

REFUSAL TO TAKE AFFIRMATIVE STAND SUPPORTING DE-FUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD, A MAJOR BREACH OF FAITH

By WILLIAM MAYER

March 21, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - As should be painfully obvious at this late date, the Catholic Church is operating in a crisis mode, largely driven by twin scandals.

The first being the matter of priestly sexual abuse, with an estimated 4,692 priests [source, John Jay /Bishop's Accountability Report, pg. 26, http://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2004_02_27_JohnJay_revised/2004_02_27_John_Jay_Main_Report_Optimized.pdf the John Jay Report] having been accused of this horrific offense.

Of course allegations and convictions are entirely separate matters, but here too the Church has erred in dealing with the problem in such secrecy that the process can be characterized as at best, opaque. Again, estimates vary, but the consensus seems to be that approximately $500,000,000 in settlements have been paid out so far.

The second, most recent and continuing scandal has been the USCCB's substantial funding, through its "social justice" sub-directorate, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development [CCHD], of hard-left, sometimes neo-Marxist political organizations, under the guise of outreach to the poor and disadvantaged. Some of these are nothing more than front groups, created by Saul Alinsky 1. a communist fellow traveler.

Though some of the most obvious of these abuses have been addressed by USCCB/CCHD, it was only done grudgingly, its hand forced by public outrage rather than any process of internal review.

The negative impact caused by these matters has battered both the credibility of and most importantly, the moral teaching authority that the Church had only a few generations ago.

Despite Catholicism being in such a state of tumult and increasingly rent by schismatic sectarianism, the one remaining theological anchor that unified the majority of the Catholic world was respect for the sanctity of life, with about 60% of the laity opposed to abortion [see, 2009 Gallup Poll, http://www.gallup.com/poll/117154/catholics-similar-mainstream-abortion-stem-cells.aspx]. That approximately 4 out of 10 Catholics disagree with this basic faith proposition, is itself indicative of uncertainty about the authenticity of this supposedly foundational principle.

The Church's official written position on abortion is entirely unambiguous:

"At this particular time, abortion has become the fundamental human rights issue for all men and women of good will. .... For us abortion is of overriding concern because it negates two of our most fundamental moral imperatives: respect for innocent life, and preferential concern for the weak and defenseless...Among important issues involving the dignity of human life with which the Church is concerned, abortion necessarily plays a central role. Abortion, the direct killing of an innocent human being, is always gravely immoral (The Gospel of Life, no. 57); its victims are the most vulnerable and defenseless members of the human family. It is imperative that those who are called to serve the least among us give urgent attention and priority to this issue of justice."

Despite the USCCB making such an authoritative declaration on the matter, there now arise substantial grounds for questioning the degree to which the American Church is - at its core - genuinely pro-life and anti-abortion.

It's beyond argument that over the last few decades the Church has jumped headlong into secular political advocacy via grant-making, lobbying and other methodologies.

This was evident in the run-up to the thuggish manner in which Obamacare was rammed through Congress by a Democrat near super-majority.

Unbeknownst to many, one of the prime movers in this effort was the USCCB and its representatives.

"On Saturday, after Catholic lobbyists had finalized a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most prominent Catholic in the U.S. Government, the Politico reported that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had "delivered a critical endorsement" to Pelosi "by signing off on late-night agreement to grant a vote on an amendment barring insurance companies that participate in the exchange from covering abortions." The anti-abortion amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak, a Catholic Democrat, passed. Hence, the Bishops are now officially in favor of a bureaucratic plan that could spell the end to freedom of choice in health care and financially bankrupt the U.S."

Of course the USCCB continues to maintain that its intervention was well intended, to make sure that the far-reaching legislation would never be used to fund abortion, but anyone familiar with the case law surrounding such matters knows that once in effect, abortion will be declared by judicial fiat, to be just another aspect of providing gender specific "women's healthcare" and will be funded...forever.

To claim otherwise doesn't pass the smell test.

Due to this sleight of hand, the Church suffered a further loss of credibility in traditional Catholic circles over its gleeful effort to work with extreme pro-abortionists in order to nationalize healthcare, because many of these more orthodox [and more conservative] Catholics knew exactly what was taking place, despite the attempts by the USCCB to defend its actions on the grounds that universal healthcare was a legitimate part of the Church's [utopian and entirely secular] "social justice," agenda.

Setting new dynamics in place, especially on this scale at the federal level always produce unanticipated consequences.

A significant part of this blowback was that Obamacare, though still not actually in effect, proved so distasteful to Americans that voters revolted, throwing the Democrat majority out of Congress and replacing it with a much more conservative GOP majority, with an eye to killing this massive federal intrusion.

The impact of this latest Catholic "social justice" escapade has been tremendously harmful, further tarnishing the reputation of a Church already under siege.

Funding pro-abortion entities, working with politicians who have supported infanticide [witness then Illinois Senator Obama's bottling up of SB 1082], heavily lobbying to impose a system of government healthcare which ultimately will forever fund abortion - these and similar, theologically questionable, matters are forcing the faithful to ask themselves whether their Church really is pro-life.

There is a way of arriving at an answer to this thorny question. One can form a hypothesis and then test the Church's dedication to its stated position. We therefore assume, for purposes of this testing process, that the Church is genuinely pro-life to its core.

An important aspect of the new conservative majority in Congress was its rededication to ending all federal funding for abortion, which manifestly is and has been taking place for many years, though in a stealthy manner.

With the knowledge of how this shell game is being played, conservatives, primarily GOP legislators led by Congressman Mike Pence [R, IN] voted to defund the nation's largest single provider of abortion, Planned Parenthood. The group has received hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money over the years to perform this odious procedure.

The organization itself is ideologically rooted in its founder, Margaret Sanger's, master race theories including eugenics [the science of "improving" the human population] made infamous by the Third Reich. Sanger's goal was to remove the "undesirables," from society, which of course included, ethnic minority groups, the chronically infirm and those with subpar IQs.

During that same year the group received $363,200,000 in government funding [see, Penny Starr, Planned Parenthood's Federal Funding Rose to $363.2 Million in FY 2008-2009, CNS News, http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/planned-parenthood-annual-report-shows-3]

The translation of this is chilling; the federal government was paying Planned Parenthood a bounty of about $1,000 for every life snuffed out.

With this sordid history and especially given all of the USCCB's rhetoric regarding life issues one would have presumed that they would have been in the forefront, leading the charge with Mr. Pence in order to save millions of unborns, from [an often gruesome] death.

But this was not the case. Given the opportunity to prove its true commitment to life, the U.S. Bishops ran for the hills, nowhere to be found. All that remained on the issue in the halls of the USSCB was the deafening roar of total silence - of complete abdication of responsibility.

Going through the USCCB website we were struck by the absence of any statements supporting the defunding of Planned Parenthood. This seemed very odd and we contacted the USCCB and its various ministries numerous times for comment.

At first stonewalled, we finally received the following inscrutable prose, well after deadline, from the Bishop's press office:

"The bishops have not issued a press release or formal statement re Congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood."

Mystified at the apparent incongruity of claiming to be pro-life but when given the opportunity, failing to lift a finger to end Planned Parenthood's abortion mill, they did nothing.

When we sought additional clarification, again, the sound of chirping crickets.

Additionally we made several inquiries to the press office of the Archdiocese of Galveston/Houston, presided over by Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, the Chairman of the USCCB's Life Committee, to see what reasoning might lie behind the Church's failure to carry out its pro-life mandate. These efforts also proved unfruitful.

Are we seeing a pattern developing here?

In further research, checking with knowledgeable sources on the Hill, we had to conclude that the USCCB isn't interested - and indeed may be hostile - to defunding Planned Parenthood, which nonetheless passed the first hurdle, the February vote in the House of Representatives with 11 Democrats joining in the lopsided 240-185 vote, to pull Planned Parenthood off Uncle Sam's teat.

We must assume that they can be counted on to bravely provide this same level of non-assistance now that the matter has moved over to the Senate.

Unfortunately the aforementioned hypothesis - is the USCCB genuinely pro-life? - must be answered in the negative. Our research seems to prove that on this core element in Catholic theology - the sanctity of life - the distressing truth is that the USCCB talks a really good game, but when the chips are down, heads for the exits, jealous of preserving its incestuous relationship with the pro-abortion Democrat party.

In a colloquialism possibly familiar to Galveston's Cardinal DiNardo, on the life issue, the official governing body of the American Catholic Church, the USCCB is all hat and no cattle.

In a major expose, just published, this writer exhaustively investigated the hard-left/progressive/neo-Marxist drift of the Catholic Church. Developing over the last century, it has greatly accelerated since the 60s and Vatican II.

From the piece:

"...In short, the American Catholic Church has been taken over by the left. It has been systematically conquered from within...This institutionalized leftism is strewn across nearly all of the American Church's social justice positions, with the single exception being the issue of abortion and we see in that matter the CCHD has consistently funded dozens of activist groups, many of which support the pro-abortion agenda, that goes with this ideological territory. The fact is that the USCCB/CCHD has failed to at the most basic level to defend the Church's pro-life position...

By a variety of theological twists, revisions and maneuvers since Rerum Novarum, a system has been established that indulges the personal political ideology of very liberal Church elders who have succeeded in pushing the limits of faith far outside the traditional boundaries of Catholicism. This change has produced a Church that is far more worldly and materialistic, one preoccupied with pushing an extremist legislative agenda, all the while disingenuously claiming that its activities are faith justified, much to the detriment of the Church's traditional role as guardian of Christ's spiritual message..."

We believe this current writing serves somewhat as a coda, providing important additional perspective in support of the larger thesis [already being characterized as an "explosive investigation"] which concludes that Catholicism is on the verge, if it has not already crossed the threshold, of becoming so thoroughly secularized along socialist ideological lines that it might as well be a political appendage of the DNC.

When Church elders ask why their pews are becoming increasingly bereft of parishioners, they now have the answer. This Church left Catholicism a long time ago and will not return without a major reformation.

End Notes:

1. Saul Alinsky started his work in Chicago, Ill, allying himself with idealistic Catholic priests. This provided him entre into the Church and its eventual support. One of the seminal Alinsky groups, the Industrial Areas Foundation [IAF] was created in 1940 and was partially funded by the Diocese of Chicago. Today IAF works primarily in a stealth mode, using fraudulent faith based dissimulation to convince the public into believing that the organization has an authentic religious foundation. There are approximately 50 of these groups operating around the country, often in alliance with church affiliates.

One of the Alinskyite spin-off's, which received massive funding from the CCHD was ACORN, the now defunct, corrupt creation of Wade Rathke, a former member of the Marxist, Student's for a Democratic Society [SDS]. It is admitted by Church spokesmen that ACORN was given in excess of $7,300,000 in support. [see, Dennis Sadowski, CCHD ends funding to ACORN over financial irregularities, Catholic News Service, http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0805268.htm].

ACORN functioned as a voter registration machine for the Democrat party and was involved in numerous prosecutions for voter fraud.

The U.S. Conference Of Catholic Bishops' Dereliction Of Duty On Pro Life Matters

REFUSAL TO TAKE AFFIRMATIVE STAND SUPPORTING DE-FUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD, A MAJOR BREACH OF FAITH

March 21, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - As should be painfully obvious at this late date, the Catholic Church is operating in a crisis mode, largely driven by twin scandals.

The first being the matter of priestly sexual abuse, with an estimated 4,692 priests [source, John Jay /Bishop's Accountability Report, pg. 26, http://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2004_02_27_JohnJay_revised/2004_02_27_John_Jay_Main_Report_Optimized.pdf the John Jay Report] having been accused of this horrific offense.

Of course allegations and convictions are entirely separate matters, but here too the Church has erred in dealing with the problem in such secrecy that the process can be characterized as at best, opaque. Again, estimates vary, but the consensus seems to be that approximately $500,000,000 in settlements have been paid out so far.

The second, most recent and continuing scandal has been the USCCB's substantial funding, through its "social justice" sub-directorate, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development [CCHD], of hard-left, sometimes neo-Marxist political organizations, under the guise of outreach to the poor and disadvantaged. Some of these are nothing more than front groups, created by Saul Alinsky 1. a communist fellow traveler.

Though some of the most obvious of these abuses have been addressed by USCCB/CCHD, it was only done grudgingly, its hand forced by public outrage rather than any process of internal review.

The negative impact caused by these matters has battered both the credibility of and most importantly, the moral teaching authority that the Church had only a few generations ago.

Despite Catholicism being in such a state of tumult and increasingly rent by schismatic sectarianism, the one remaining theological anchor that unified the majority of the Catholic world was respect for the sanctity of life, with about 60% of the laity opposed to abortion [see, 2009 Gallup Poll, http://www.gallup.com/poll/117154/catholics-similar-mainstream-abortion-stem-cells.aspx]. That approximately 4 out of 10 Catholics disagree with this basic faith proposition, is itself indicative of uncertainty about the authenticity of this supposedly foundational principle.

The Church's official written position on abortion is entirely unambiguous:

"At this particular time, abortion has become the fundamental human rights issue for all men and women of good will. .... For us abortion is of overriding concern because it negates two of our most fundamental moral imperatives: respect for innocent life, and preferential concern for the weak and defenseless...Among important issues involving the dignity of human life with which the Church is concerned, abortion necessarily plays a central role. Abortion, the direct killing of an innocent human being, is always gravely immoral (The Gospel of Life, no. 57); its victims are the most vulnerable and defenseless members of the human family. It is imperative that those who are called to serve the least among us give urgent attention and priority to this issue of justice."

Despite the USCCB making such an authoritative declaration on the matter, there now arise substantial grounds for questioning the degree to which the American Church is - at its core - genuinely pro-life and anti-abortion.

It's beyond argument that over the last few decades the Church has jumped headlong into secular political advocacy via grant-making, lobbying and other methodologies.

This was evident in the run-up to the thuggish manner in which Obamacare was rammed through Congress by a Democrat near super-majority.

Unbeknownst to many, one of the prime movers in this effort was the USCCB and its representatives.

"On Saturday, after Catholic lobbyists had finalized a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most prominent Catholic in the U.S. Government, the Politico reported that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had delivered a critical endorsement" to Pelosi by signing off on late-night agreement to grant a vote on an amendment barring insurance companies that participate in the exchange from covering abortions." The anti-abortion amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak, a Catholic Democrat, passed. Hence, the Bishops are now officially in favor of a bureaucratic plan that could spell the end to freedom of choice in health care and financially bankrupt the U.S."

Of course the USCCB continues to maintain that its intervention was well intended, to make sure that the far-reaching legislation would never be used to fund abortion, but anyone familiar with the case law surrounding such matters knows that once in effect, abortion will become just another part of providing gender specific "women's health" and will be funded. To claim otherwise doesn't pass the smell test.

Due to this sleight of hand, the Church suffered a further loss of credibility in traditional Catholic circles over its gleeful effort to work with extreme pro-abortionists in order to nationalize healthcare, because many of these more orthodox [and more conservative] Catholics knew exactly what was taking place, despite the attempts by the USCCB to defend its actions on the grounds that universal healthcare was a legitimate part of the Church's [utopian and entirely secular] "social justice," agenda.

Setting new dynamics in place, especially on this scale at the federal level always produce unanticipated consequences.

A significant part of this blowback was that Obamacare, though still not actually in effect, proved so distasteful to Americans that voters revolted, throwing the Democrat majority out of Congress and replacing it with a much more conservative GOP majority, with an eye to killing this massive federal intrusion.

The impact of this latest Catholic "social justice" escapade has been tremendously harmful, further tarnishing the reputation of a Church already under siege.

Funding pro-abortion entities, working with politicians who have supported infanticide [witness then Illinois Senator Obama's bottling up of SB 1082], heavily lobbying to impose a system of government healthcare which ultimately will forever fund abortion - these and similar, theologically questionable, matters are forcing the faithful to ask themselves whether their Church really is pro-life.

There is a way of arriving at an answer to this thorny question. One can form a hypothesis and then test the Church's dedication to its stated position. We therefore assume, for purposes of this testing process, that the Church is genuinely pro-life to its core.

An important aspect of the new conservative majority in Congress was its rededication to ending all federal funding for abortion, which manifestly is and has been taking place for many years, though in a stealthy manner.

With the knowledge of how this shell game is being played, conservatives, primarily GOP legislators led by Congressman Mike Pence [R, IN] voted to defund the nation's largest single provider of abortion, Planned Parenthood. The group has received hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money over the years to perform this odious procedure.

The organization itself is ideologically rooted in its founder, Margaret Sanger's, master race theories including eugenics [the science of "improving" the human population] made infamous by the Third Reich. Sanger's goal was to remove the "undesirables," from society, which of course included, ethnic minority groups, the chronically infirm and those with subpar IQs.

During that same year the group received $363,200,000 in government funding [see, Penny Starr, Planned Parenthood's Federal Funding Rose to $363.2 Million in FY 2008-2009, CNS News, http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/planned-parenthood-annual-report-shows-3]

The translation of this is chilling; the federal government was paying Planned Parenthood a bounty of about $1,000 for every life snuffed out.

With this sordid history and especially given all of the USCCB's rhetoric regarding life issues one would have presumed that they would have been in the forefront, leading the charge with Mr. Pence in order to save millions of unborns, from [an often gruesome] death.

But this was not the case. Given the opportunity to prove its true commitment to life, the U.S. Bishops ran for the hills, nowhere to be found. All that remained on the issue in the halls of the USSCB was the deafening roar of total silence - of complete abdication of responsibility.

Going through the USCCB website we were struck by the absence of any statements supporting the defunding of Planned Parenthood. This seemed very odd and we contacted the USCCB and its various ministries numerous times for comment.

At first stonewalled, we finally received the following inscrutable prose, well after deadline, from the Bishop's press office:

"The bishops have not issued a press release or formal statement re Congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood."

Mystified at the apparent incongruity of claiming to be pro-life but when given the opportunity, failing to lift a finger to end Planned Parenthood's abortion mill, they did nothing.

When we sought additional clarification, again, the sound of chirping crickets.

Additionally we made several inquiries to the press office of the Archdiocese of Galveston/Houston, presided over by Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, the Chairman of the USCCB's Life Committee, to see what reasoning might lie behind the Church's failure to carry out its pro-life mandate. These efforts also proved unfruitful.

Are we seeing a pattern developing here?

In further research, checking with knowledgeable sources on the Hill, we had to conclude that the USCCB isn't interested - and indeed may be hostile - to defunding Planned Parenthood, which nonetheless passed the first hurdle, the February vote in the House of Representatives with 11 Democrats joining in the lopsided 240-185 vote, to pull Planned Parenthood off Uncle Sam's teat.

We must assume that they can be counted on to bravely provide this same level of non-assistance now that the matter has moved over to the Senate.

Unfortunately the aforementioned hypothesis - is the USCCB genuinely pro-life? - must be answered in the negative. Our research seems to prove that on this core element in Catholic theology - the sanctity of life - the distressing truth is that the USCCB talks a reakkt good game, but when the chips are down, heads for the exits, jealous of preserving its incestuous relationship with the pro-abortion Democrat party.

In a colloquialism possibly familiar to Galveston's Cardinal DiNardo, on the life issue, the official governing body of the American Catholic Church, the USCCB is all hat and no cattle.

In a major expose, just published, this writer exhaustively investigated the hard-left/progressive/neo-Marxist drift of the Catholic Church, which has developed over the last century but greatly accelerated since the 60s.

From the piece:

"...In short, the American Catholic Church has been taken over by the left. It has been systematically conquered from within...This institutionalized leftism is strewn across nearly all of the American Church's social justice positions, with the single exception being the issue of abortion and we see in that matter the CCHD has consistently funded dozens of activist groups, many of which support the pro-abortion agenda, that goes with this ideological territory. The fact is that the USCCB/CCHD has failed to at the most basic level to defend the Church's pro-life position...

By a variety of theological twists, revisions and maneuvers since Rerum Novarum, a system has been established that indulges the personal political ideology of very liberal Church elders who have succeeded in pushing the limits of faith far outside the traditional boundaries of Catholicism. This change has produced a Church that is far more worldly and materialistic, one preoccupied with pushing an extremist legislative agenda, all the while disingenuously claiming that its activities are faith justified, much to the detriment of the Church's traditional role as guardian of Christ's spiritual message..."

We believe this current writing serves somewhat as a coda, providing important additional perspective in support of the larger thesis [already being characterized as an "explosive investigation"] which concluded that Catholicism is on the verge, if it has not already crossed the threshold, of becoming so thoroughly secularized along socialist ideological lines that it might as well be a political appendage of the DNC.

When Church elders ask why their pews are becoming increasingly bereft of parishioners, they now have the answer. This Church left Catholicism a long time ago and will not return without a major reformation.

End Notes:

1. Saul Alinsky started his work in Chicago, Ill, allying himself with idealistic Catholic priests. This provided him entre into the Church and its eventual support. One of the seminal Alinsky groups, the Industrial Areas Foundation [IAF] was created in 1940 and was partially funded by the Diocese of Chicago. Today IAF works primarily in a stealth mode, using fraudulent faith based dissimulation to convince the public into believing that the organization has an authentic religious foundation. There are approximately 50 of these groups operating around the country, often in alliance with church affiliates.

One of the Alinskyite spin-off's, which received massive funding from the CCHD was ACORN, the now defunct, corrupt creation of Wade Rathke, a former member of the Marxist, Student's for a Democratic Society [SDS]. It is admitted by Church spokesmen that ACORN was given in excess of $7,300,000 in support. [see, Dennis Sadowski, CCHD ends funding to ACORN over financial irregularities, Catholic News Service, http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0805268.htm]. ACORN functioned as a voter registration machine for the Democrat party and was involved in numerous prosecutions for voter fraud.

Eminent American Muslim Jurist, Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, Declares Devout Muslims Must Observe Shari'a In All Aspects Of Life

He is the past President of the Islamic Society of North America, notorious for it having been named by government prosecutors in U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation [the largest and most successful - all defendants convicted on all 108 charges - American prosecution of Hamas funding] under the heading, "List of Unindicted Co-conspirators and/or Joint Venturers*"

The group was specifically identified under the additional heading, "The following are individuals/entities who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood." [source, view the government document here, archived at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, List of Unindicted Co-conspirators and/or Joint Venturers*

Mr. Siddiqi is so prominent an authority among American Muslims that he is the Chairman of the Executive Council of The Fiqh Council of North America - itself an affiliate of ISNA - [source, http://www.fiqhcouncil.org/node/6].

The Fiqh Council is entrusted with making determinations regarding Islamic law, Shari'a. It issues fatwas, legally binding opinions, regarding such matters. One might liken it to an Islamic court of appeal.

A very popular Islamic website, IslamOnline, a kind of semi-official Muslim web portal, contains a section where Muslims can ask guidance on matters regarding their faith. That section is called "Ask the Scholar." Pronouncements made here represent what are in the eyes of Muslims, legitimate decisions, they carry weight.

In a 3/13/2011 posting, the question is posed:

"I want to know the role which Islam and Allah play in your goals and your success in life. Should religion be kept away from school, athletics, and work? Must you pray for guidance from Allah or keep religion separated and just work hard?"

The response bears heavily on the current discussion in America and the West in general as to the linkage between the practice of Islam and Shari'a , and the degree to which observant Muslims are required to not only live by its all-encompassing precepts, but work, conduct jihad, to fight or struggle in the path or way of Allah to make Islam supreme.

In the newly released study by the Center for Security Policy Shari'a is thoroughly deconstructed, "Translated as the path," shariah is a comprehensive legal and political framework. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, it would be a mistake to think of shariah as a religious" code in the Western sense because it seeks to regulate all manner of behavior in the secular sphere - economic, social, military, legal and political... shariah is an immutable, compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to install and the world required to adopt, the failure to do so being deemed a damnable offence against Allah..."

The study expands upon the above in the following description of the doctrine an, "all-encompassing Islamic political-military-legal doctrine known as shariah. It obliges them to engage in jihad to achieve the triumph of Islam worldwide through the establishment of a global Islamic state governed exclusively by shariah, under a restored caliphate.[see, Shariah: The Threat Posed To America, CSP, 2011, pg. 6., pg. 11, Download Here]

With that in mind, let us turn to the answer, provided by Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi:

"Answering your question, Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, former president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), states the following:

"Allah Almighty says in the Quran: "O you who believe! Enter into Islam whole-heartedly; and follow not the footsteps of the Evil One; for he is to you an avowed enemy." (Al-Baqarah:208)

He Almighty also says, "Say: Truly, my prayer and my service of sacrifice, my life and my death, are (all) for Allah, the Cherisher of the Worlds; no partner has He: this am I commanded, and I am the first among those who submit to Him." (Al-An`am: 163).

Faith in Allah has everything to do with every aspect of our lives. We cannot compartmentalize religion or life. Islam requires that we live our whole life, every aspect of life in obedience to Allah. We are not part-time servants of Allah. We belong to Allah. We are for Allah, by Allah and moving towards Allah. We are His servants every moment of our life and we must live our whole life in obedience to Him. Our work, school, athletics activity, family life, economics, politics everything must be according to Allah's Rules. Whatever He Almighty has allowed is allowed for us, and whatever He Almighty has forbidden is forbidden. All His rules are for our own good and we must live by them...."[source, http://www.onislam.net/english/ask-the-scholar/shariah-based-systems/imamate-and-political-systems/174334-separation-between-religion-and-life.html?Political_Systems=]

At the conclusion of this answer, Mr. Siddiqi takes pains to counsel "tolerance," and being "courteous."

These words take on a very different meaning within a framework of Shari'a and properly parsed, amount to little but reassuring sounding sophistry.

As noted earlier, Shari'a as understood by the ilk of Siddiqi is not just for Muslims, it was intended as applying to mankind in general. If you are fully supportive of Shari'a, if a Muslim believes, in the words of Mr. Siddiqi that, "Islam requires that we live our whole life, every aspect of life in obedience to Allah," then that would invariably include the obligation to struggle to bring the faith to all.

This understanding has been the case from the religion's earliest classical period when Islamic jurists including the learned historian, philosopher and economist, ibn Khaldun [1332-1406] were unanimous in agreeing that Islam's mission was universal, that all mankind should operate under its principles.

"...The consensus on the nature of jihad from all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence is clear. Summarizing this consensus of centuries of Islamic thought, the renowned Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, who died in 1406, wrote:

"In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force," he wrote. "The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense."

Only Islam, Ibn Khaldun added, "is under obligation to gain power over other nations."

[source, Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy Of Jihad: Islamic Holy War And The Fate Of Non-Muslims. Web reference, http://www.bereanpublishers.com/Cults/Muslims/jihad_warfrom_the_prophet_muham.htm]

Dr. Siddiqi, in his IslamOnline posting unselfconsciously is fully in agreement with this proposition. Looked at another way given his long association with the Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA] it should stand to reason that his and the MB's ideology be in alignment.Perhaps the clearest modern statement expressing the idea of Islamic supremacy/triumphalism can be found in the 1991 document written by Mohamed Akram, "...a senior Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood official in the U.S. at the time, and approved by the MBs Shura Council and Organizational Conference..." [see, http://bigpeace.com/jguandolo/2011/03/12/the-muslim-brotherhood-in-america-part-iii-the-settlement-process/].The 18 page document [available here General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, archived at the Investigative Project on Terrorism] was a key piece of evidence entered into the record by government prosecutors in the aforementioned U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation trial.In the English preface, Akram states quite categorically:

"Understanding the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America:

The process of settlement is a Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

It should be clear then that for some Muslims, Islam can't be delimited within a solely personal sphere, that, according to their belief structure, it's naturally destined to encompass everything, even the secular.

This iteration of Islam, call it Islamism, political Islam or Muslim fundamentalism, ceases to be a religion, rather it morphs into a political ideology, one which is intent upon replacing the mechanisms whereby the West governs itself. Therefore it represents a civilizational challenge which must be countered.

With the ultimate intent of undermining and eventually replacing the U.S. Constitution, Shari'a does not deserve nor should it be allowed to masquerade as a religion, protected by the First Amendment. It's a seditious threat doctrine which at its core is anti-freedom, anti-liberty and violative of paragraph 2 of the Sixth Amendment, the so-called "supremacy clause," making it additionally, unconstitutional.

As the threats, accusations and scare tactics of key American Islamist organizations preceding last week's first panel of Representative Peter King's hearings on the rise of domestic Islamic radicalism made clear, proponents of the ideology of Shari'a are manifestly intolerant. Not only do they reject the right of others to criticize their actions and motivation, but they are forcefully pushing for laws to make such criticism rise to the level of being hate crimes, a tactic which they have pulled off rather successfully in Europe, where people can be fined and/or jailed for violating the Islamist principle that one can't insult or criticize Islam without grave consequences.

The full court press to destroy Peter King's reputation and shut down his hearings, on the grounds that mere criticism of Islam or self-appointed Muslim spokesmen is Islamophobic should provide an important [in lefty parlance] a "teachable moment," for it was clearly an attempt to force Shari'a compliance on a Congressional committee, to hold the U.S House hostage to Shari'as blasphemy statutes, a concept so alien and un-American that it must have had knowledgeable viewers scratching their heads, questioning whether the rants against the hearings they were watching were taking place in America's capitol city or Islamabad, Pakistan.

Will Moroccan Financed Institution In Amsterdam Become A Jihad Center?

By BEILA RABINOWITZ

March 18, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Geert Wilders, the head of Holland's Freedom Party, says that a Moroccan cultural center aimed at strengthening ties between Moroccans and Dutch will achieve exactly the opposite.

The politician stated that, "The Moroccan government should not in any way be involved with Moroccans in Holland." The center is to be financed by the Moroccan government for the purpose of providing Moroccan youth with a greater knowledge of their culture. [source, http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/9301402/__PVV_tegen_Marokkanencentrum__.html?sn=binnenland,buitenland]

Wilders thinks that the center will work against the integration of Moroccans in Holland, already a huge problem in the Netherlands, and has asked for clarification from the Minister of Internal Affairs. The Moroccan Minister for migrant affairs made the announcement while in Amsterdam, expressing his "satisfaction" at how well Moroccans had integrated there.

That claim is beyond the pale:

For example, in early November, 2004 Moroccan born, Dutch educated jihadist Mohammed Bouyeri, brutally murdered [nearly decapitating] the film maker Theo van Gogh because Bouyeri decided that van Gogh's film about the abuse of women, by male Muslims, "insulted Islam."

According to crime statistics, half of all Dutch born Moroccan youth have had encounters with law enforcement. Moreover, these immigrants have adamantly refused to learn the language, adjust to a secular pluralistic culture and become integrated into society

In an article entitled "Moroccan Youth Terrorise Dutch Town" this writer cited the Dutch newspaper Trouw's reporting on one of numerous incidents involving Moroccan youth and their targeting of native born Dutch, "The problems with the Moroccan youth in Oosterwei are ongoing since 2008. Residents are accosted on the street, hit with stones and eggs, robbed and cursed at by youth who are mostly younger than 12 years old." [source, translated from the Dutch - sourced at - http://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/nederland/article3292927.ece/Schade_reljeugd_Gouda_verhaald_op_ouders.html, https://www.pipelinenews.org/2010/Moroccan-Youth-Terrorize-Dutch-Town.html]

With this in mind concerns raised by Wilders and others take on special importance, given the antagonistic tribalism currently on display by all too many of the country's Moroccans.

March 17, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - I am of a Christian background. However, one of my favorite people was Jewish, and another is Muslim.

The Jewish man was business professor and author Julian Simon. He taught that people are the world's most valuable resource, and the "ultimate resource" is our creative intellect.

The Muslim is Bangladeshi banker and economist Muhammad Yunus. He says "poor people are like bonsai trees," planted in a little pot. "There is nothing wrong with their seeds. It's just that society never gave them an adequate soil base to grow."

"Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity," Dr. Yunus continues, "poverty will disappear very quickly. The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is free them from the chains that governments have put around them."

We need freedom, and opportunities to get an education and open businesses. We need a government and legal system that protects our property rights and contracts, regulates dangerous pollution and activities, and protects us from criminals and unscrupulous business people, but without having so many rules that people and businesses cannot function properly.

But even if we have all these things, we still cannot have opportunity, health and prosperity unless we also have energy. Maybe most of all we need enough affordable, reliable electricity to power lights, ovens, refrigerators, computers, machinery, fans and air conditioners, office and hospital equipment, mobile phone chargers and other modern devices.

These technologies let us work past sundown, create good jobs, make products that people need, and provide clean water, surgical centers and countless other benefits.

That's why Mr. Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality in America, calls energy the "master resource." He says our ingenuity is the ultimate, most important resource, because it lets us design, build and operate so many things.

However, without energy that families and businesses can afford, energy that is there every time we need it, even the most modern, creative, educated, technologically advanced country cannot function properly. People in poor countries are even more constricted, like bonsai plants in little pots.

Right here in Uganda, we have many educated, energetic, creative, hard working people. Our legal system lets us open businesses and do many other things. But outside of Kampala and other growing municipalities like Ishaka, Jinja and Gulu, most families, villages and businesses still don't have electricity  and even in these municipalities frequent power outages create problems. Almost 30 million Ugandans never have electricity or get it only a few hours a week.

That means over 90% of Ugandans cannot really use their education, skills and desire to improve their lives. They can only do what is possible with wood, charcoal, paraffin and muscle power. How is that different from what our ancestors could do 100 years ago?

It's a good thing we have the Nulubaala Power Station. Otherwise Uganda wouldn't have any electricity. But when we wanted to generate more hydroelectric power at Bujagali Falls, environmentalists opposed the dam and the World Bank refused to support its construction. Now we have new hope.

Drilling companies report that they have already discovered 380,000,000 cubic meters (2.4 billion barrels) of oil  and enough natural gas to provide 400,000 cubic meters (14,000,000 cubic feet) every day  just in Uganda. Much more will likely be discovered in Uganda and other Great Lakes countries.

Some say this will just be another "oil curse," fueling corruption. I think it is a huge blessing that could fuel an economic boom. It's up to us. We need to choose our destiny, and work hard to achieve it.

Turning oil into usable energy requires pipelines, refineries and other infrastructure. But with the turmoil in the Middle East, and oil prices climbing, we need to develop it. It will take time, but we need to do it.

Natural gas is a different story. This clean burning energy could fuel several big power plants that would generate enough electricity to turn lights on all over Uganda and the Great Lakes region. We wouldn't need to dam Bujagali Falls. We wouldn't have to continue living in poverty and darkness, without the jobs and other blessings that electricity can bring. And we can do it quickly, in a couple of years, if environmentalists would stop fighting us.

Our natural gas really could be the "master resource" that transforms and improves our lives. This precious resource, which companies used to burn off as useless and unwanted, is the energy Uganda deserves to have, the energy it needs to become a modern, healthy, prosperous nation.

Some say we should use wind and solar power, instead of gas. But the "renewable" electricity these systems generate is too limited, expensive and unreliable for African families and businesses. Even France, Germany and Spain are ending their subsidies and giving up on wind and solar power, for these very reasons. If they can't afford it, how can Africa?

Besides, even if Uganda did build wind turbines and solar panels, we would still need gas-powered electric power plants, to generate electricity every time the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. We should just build the gas-fired generating plants, instead.

Let everyone in Uganda  President Museveni, Members of Parliament, ministers, companies, village elders and our people  join together in making this happen. Let us work to find companies and other investors who want to help us build the power plants we need to generate the electricity that will support homes, hospitals, schools, factories, shops, hotels, tourism, water treatment plants and farms. Let us do likewise throughout Africa.

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King told an audience in Washington, DC, "I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

Today, I too have a dream. That one day soon, this nation will rise up out of poverty, and every man, woman and child will have equal access to affordable, reliable electricity  and the blessings and true equality it can bring.

Together, we can make it happen.

Cyril Boynes, Jr. is co-chair of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda and a tireless advocate for health and prosperity in Africa and all other developing regions.

March 9, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Muzammil Hassan, a Pakistani born 46 year old television entrepreneur was sentenced today for the brutal beheading of his wife, Aasiay, receiving the maximum sentence for second degree murder, 25 years to life.

We remain mystified why such a cold blooded act could be defined as anything other than murder in the first degree.

Muzammil and Aasiay established the Muslim-centric Bridges TV in 2004 [visit website, http://www.bridgestv.com/]

The company claims that, "Bridges TV is the first channel of its kind that offers a broad range of lifestyle oriented programming that aims to foster a greater understanding between the West and MESA (Middle Eastern/South Asian) religions, its cultures, and diverse populations." [source, http://www.bridgestv.com/AboutUs_Company.aspx]

To gather some perspective regarding Bridges' content one can visit the network's Top News stories on its index page, which carries a report on the Peter King hearings on American Muslim radicalization, which commence tomorrow. Solicited for comment on the hearings was the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR] spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

CAIR represents itself as being a moderate civil rights organization despite the fact of it having been embroiled in substantial controversy almost since its inception.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism, headed by Steven Emerson, had this posting regarding CAIR's troubling associations:

"... There's another letter circulating on Capitol Hill affirming federal law enforcement's belief that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is the product of a Hamas-support network in the United States. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent the letter last month to four members of Congress who asked for details last fall on how CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-finance trial against the Holy Land Foundation and its former officials.

He included trial transcripts and exhibits "which demonstrated a relationship among CAIR, individual CAIR founders, and the Palestine Committee. Evidence was also introduced that demonstrated a relationship between the Palestine Committee and HAMAS, which was designated as a terrorist organization in 1995." Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and trial exhibits show the Brotherhood created the Palestine Committee. CAIR officials adamantly deny any involvement with either Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. The Weich letter, however, shows that the Department of Justice has not wavered in its conclusion that the internal records it possesses prove a connection..." [source, The Investigative Project of Terrorism, DOJ: CAIR's Unindicted Co-Conspirator Status Legit, March 12, 2010, http://www.investigativeproject.org/1854/doj-cairs-unindicted-co-conspirator-status-legit]

Bias of his news operation aside, many observers of Hassan's trial noted a complete lack of remorse for his grotesque crime, instead playing the part of the victim who was abused by his wife, thus justifying justifying his actions - which included stabbing his wife 40 times before the ceremonial beheading.

"...Muzammil is not only a man, he is a male batterer, who is also a Pakistani and Muslim man. What this means is that he has been brought up to believe that he is entitled to whatever he needs, thinks he needs, or wants. Anyone who deprives him of what he needs or wants, is a dangerous "terrorist" enemy, especially if she is a womanand a woman who wants to leave him exposes his failings to the world."

According to Muzzammil, he and Aasiya made a "contract" which included certain terms, i.e. that she never turn to the police, never threaten divorce, never report him to Child Protective Services. Each time she does so, he is being "killed," his world is "collapsing," his pride is wounded, his failure to control his wife has become known..."

In microcosm, the trial of Hassan and today's sentencing, provide a perfect, though tragic, backdrop for the start of the King hearings, which will hopefully further expose the threat doctrine known as Shari'a [the path], an all encompassing Islamic social/political code of conduct - which sees no boundary between the private and the secular - zero degrees of separation between church and state.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Iran And Re-establishing The Caliphate

March 16, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - A March 14 posting at Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood's official English website, reveals that it has had "informal," ties with Iran's Shia theocracy for years.

"The Muslim Brotherhood seeks unity between Muslims calling for justice, civil society and a free and fair political arena. As part of its strategy it engages with nations like Iran  and groups  like Hamas - that would otherwise perhaps be ostracized, a move that would only isolate and inflate division and conflict...In this context, the Muslim Brotherhood has maintained informal ties with Iran for many years. Under the influence of the tolerant Brotherhood, Egyptians are more comfortable with Shiite Islam than other Sunnis in other Arab countries." [source, MB website, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=28217]

This is obviously an effort to unify and unite the Ummah, the Arabic word for the Muslim world community, a goal much desired by Islamists, knowing that their dream of a worldwide caliphate can't come to pass, unless some level of unity is established. The immense political power which Iran's nuke program would lend to such a unification would be substantial, a point which is probably wasted on Team Obama's inept State Department [who is Hillary having tea with today?].

"With a history of...the West's dedication to divide and rule the Muslim world, the Muslim Brotherhood has sought to combat sectarianism, put the Shiite-Sunni conflict aside, and create a united Muslim front; even if that includes Iran."

It should go without saying that couching the Brotherhood's supposed outreach to and support of Hamas is laughable, since the MB created the organization, brick by brick.

In this piece the MB continues to rail against Arab rulers who are supposedly not authentically Muslim because of their cooperation with the West, which is castigated in the Brotherhood's standard Marxist tinged rhetoric, "...being controlled and influenced by colonialist rule...In its commitment to decry the role of corrupt Arab rulers and the onslaught of Western manipulations to gain control of Arab wealth..."

What we find significant here is the above-board manner in which the MB is publicly and in English, making clear their long term strategic goal of establishing a united Ummah, under a caliphate and guided by Shari'a.

The last genuine caliphate was established by the Turkish Ottomans, starting with Mehmed II, but then accelerating greatly when the Ottomans defeated the Cairo based Mamluk Sultanate, an event which added Egypt, most of the Arabian Peninsula and Syria to the Ottoman Caliphate.

The MB's transnationalism, its clear strategy of uniting, past long-held sectarian grievances, especially between the Sunnis and Shias, should now be apparent to all but the dull.

This is a worldwide effort, the MB has outposts in at least 70 countries. Its numerous front groups in America appear to be marching in lockstep, with the accelerated push to shove Shari'a compliance into the secular sphere, "Meanwhile, the Brotherhood continued in its attempts to unite Muslims on a global scale...Perhaps the US fails to understand why a variety of nations, with obviously different trends, would loosely affiliate with each other for a common goal; the end to occupation. Indeed, a democratic goal."

At the official level there is no "perhaps," regarding the U.S.' current political leadership. It remains studiously ignorant of the import of the above outlined developments and willfully blind to the threat which will be posed by a united, Shari'a fueled Ummah and guided by an MB like revolutionary zeal.

Saudi/Gulf States Military Assistance To Bahrain Had Approval Of White House?

March 14, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Over the past few days a relatively small Gulf State military force, led by Saudi Arabia has entered Bahrain, intending to quell the increasing unrest in the country primarily led by its Shia majority. The force is apparently there with the blessing of Bahrain's ruling monarchy.

So far the WH has been mum on the troop movement.

The latest out of the State Dept. was a formulaic statement issued by the now departed P.J. Crowley, "The United States is very concerned by recent violence surrounding protests in Bahrain. We have received confirmation that two protesters in Bahrain were recently killed, and offer our condolences to the families and friends of the two individuals who lost their lives. The United States welcomes the Government of Bahrain's statements that it will investigate these deaths, and that it will take legal action against any unjustified use of force by Bahraini security forces. We urge that it follow through on these statements as quickly as possible. We also call on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from violence." [source, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/02/156626.htm]

Bahrain occupies a strategic location in the Middle East, lying just off the East coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf.

In 2010 the Navy started an ambitious half-billion dollar program to double the size of the installation. The project is slated for completion in 2013.

The Fifth Fleet has a substantial ability to project force. Last year CentCom established a policy whereby 2 aircraft carrier strike groups be maintained within the fleet, at least 9 months out of the year [see, Navy Times, http://www.navytimes.com/news/2011/03/navy-2-carrier-requirement-for5th- fleet_030111w/]. Currently on duty are the Enterprise and Carl Vinson carrier strike groups.

The following is purely conjecture, but with this level of national commitment to the tiny but strategically located nation, it defies logic that the WH and the defense establishment would not be in full, if only privately expressed, support for the limited Saudi/Gulf force presence in the country.

Given Iran's constant threats and saber rattling, it's very difficult to believe that the U.S. isn't doing everything in its power to prevent Iran from wielding any more influence in the country via Bahrain's Shia majority which are ethnically of Persian, not Arabic descent.

January 31, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - According to the liberal press [a redundancy for sure] Americans should view news of what appears to be an eventual Muslim Brotherhood triumph in Egypt as a good thing; good for Egypt in that it purportedly represents a consequent triumph of democracy and good for the United States since we will no longer be tied to the despised in, some circles, Hosni Mubarak presidency.

On the Atlantic Magazine Wire [see, Caitlin Dickinson, The Muslim Brotherhood: The Future Of Egypt?, http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/The-Muslim-Brotherhood-The-Future-of-Egypt-6780] we find a posting, a regurgitation really of material already published on other liberal sources such as the Huff Post, extolling the moderate nature of the MB.

Writes Cara Parks, HuffPost, "...the Muslim Brotherhood is known both for its support of democracy and its criticism of American foreign policy..."

Will England, WashPost, "For most of its existence in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has refrained from violence against the state. It is not the organization of radical jihadists that it is sometimes made out to be...."

Paraphrasing Think Progressives' Tonya Somander, "Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei's appearance on Fareek [sic] Zakaria's CNN show in which he denounced such assertions as "a myth perpetuated and sold by the Mubarak regime," insisting that the religiously conservative group is a minority in Egypt, but has a lot of credit because they are interested in a secular state..."

That should be enough to assess the tenor of where the MSM is coming from on Egypt and the Ikhwan; willful ignorance elevated to a virtue.

In the real world, the influence which the Muslim Brotherhood exerts is a continuation of the hard line it established in 1928 when Hassan Al Banna created the organization with the expressed intent of spreading a Wahhabist type Islam throughout not only Egypt but the entire world. This ideology was codified by the MB's theoretician Sayyid Qutb, author of what has become the jihadist playbook, "Milestones."

January 28, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Seeking to quash what is quickly developing into anti-government street warfare in major Egyptian cities, the Mubarak administration has arrested over 40 members of the country's main terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

"The recent crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters in a nationwide sweep took place with the arresting, abducting and detaining of many more MB's. Security personnel arrested 6 MB members from Kerdasa who were supporters of Abdul Salam Bashendy after storming their houses at dawn....The constituency of Ismailia witnessed 33 arrests as MB members were hanging posters...Forces also arrested 6 MB's from Alayat Giza, where Dr. Hossam Shendi was nominated after ransacking their houses..."

[source, 43 MBs arrested overnight with the approach of elections, IkhwanWeb, the official English website for the Muslim Brotherhood, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=27128]

Since its inception in 1928 the Muslim Brotherhood has sought to topple the Egyptian government. As a result it has been suppressed, often violently, throughout its history, with varying degrees of success. The group's goal is to replace Mubarak's quasi-secular administration with a hard line Wahhabist theocracy.

January 27, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The family of a terrorist who was killed while attempting to kill IDF soldiers was given $2,000 dollars by Mahmoud Abbas [aka Abu Mazen, former chairman of Yasser Arafat's terrorist PLO and currently the leader of the Palestinian Authority's Fatah Party]. Several weeks ago the wannabe bomber ran towards an IDF checkpoint on a jihad operation shouting "Allahu Akhbar" [Allah is Greater]. He was shot and killed before he could detonate two pipe bombs he was carrying.

The money was presented to the family by the governor of the Jenin district in the name of Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinian Media Watch, a research institute that studies Palestinian society from a variety of perspectives, broke the story. For more information see, http://www.palwatch.org/pages/aboutus.aspx]

January 26, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is using the Internet very effectively in promoting the increasingly violent street demonstrations against the Mubarak government.

"Once the Muslim Brotherhood announced their participation in the Day of Rage protest scheduled for Tuesday, January 25th, Brotherhood bloggers promoted a banner across Facebook pages entitled "I'm a MB member who will demonstrate on January 25..."

[source, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=27930]

The same anonymously authored article on Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood's official website, charged the embattled and aging president with being in league with the "Zionists," "MB blogger, Sheriff Abdel-Hamid Heshmat from "Bloggers against Abu Hasira group", said, "We say no to Mubarak and his corrupt regime that allowed the Zionists to desecrate the sanctity of the Egyptian land, Damanhur. The government allows Jews to flock to Egypt every year to visit the shrine of Abu Hasira and implement US-Zionist schemes." [source, Ikhwanweb]

The Muslim Brotherhood has been violently suppressed throughout much of its history, understandably since the MB's intent is to turn back secularism and install a Shari'a based government.

Seeing the great political opportunities presented by civil unrest, the Ikhwan is engaging in a full court press to weaken Mubarak in anticipation of the September elections, the second in Egypt's history. With near universal access to the Internet, MB activists are using social networking platforms such as Facebook very effectively to spread its message.

January 25, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - What is an Executive Order? It is a President's or Governor's written declaration which has the force of law, usually based on existing statutory powers, and requiring no action by the Congress or state legislature. An Executive Order becomes law simply by publishing it in the Federal Registry.

This process totally bypasses Congressional Legislative authority (the citizen's voice) and more and more is placing in the hands of the President almost unilateral power.

The right of a president to issue Executive Orders, carrying the weight of law and establishing certain regulations, has been around since George Washington's time. His first Order by President Washington, in 1792, established a mint for the purpose of regulating coinage in the United States, establishing the value of each denomination.

For the first 100 years of our constitutional government, 1792 and 1892, 45 Executive orders were issued. The last six presidents have issued anywhere between 2 to 5 a month each with Bill Clinton amassing a whopping 415 E.O.'s during his eight years in office followed by George W. Bush running a distant second with 291.

January 24, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In a piece, the thrust of which is entirely too prevalent with the head-in-the-sand MSM, we find Time Magazine's Romesh Ratnesar concluding that radical Islam is not on the rise in the United States. He does this by conflating intentions with effectiveness, that since the numerous recent attempts at violent jihad were carried out by apparent bumblers that there is therefore no threat.

"Myrick wrote in her letter to Obama. "The strikingly accelerated rate of American Muslims arrested for involvement in terrorist activities since May 2009 makes this fact self-evident." Actually, it doesn't. Though acts of violent extremism by U.S. Muslims appear to have grown, their potency has not..." [source, Romesh Ratnesar, The Myth of Homegrown Islamic Terrorism, Time Magazine, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2044047,00.html#ixzz1ByGXvAHD]

Let's get this straight...more attacks means less of a threat, an odd bit of logic even in a periodical which has about the same relevancy in intellectual circles as does Tiger Beat Magazine.

Indicative of an absurd historical revisionism, Mr. Ratnesar seems to assert that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan [a "Soldier of Allah," one must remember - SoA(SWT), Soldier of Allah (Glory to God) - as claimed on his business cards] wasn't a terrorist.

"...The killing spree by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 doesn't fit the standard definition of terrorism: his motives were not wholly ideological..."

January 21, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - According to an unsettling report by Aaron Klein of World Net Daily, the imam who recently took the lead position in the fight to establish a huge mosque at New York's ground zero - Abdallah Adhami - is so thoroughly steeped in Wahhabism that he stated in a 2008 lecture that Muslims should claim Moses as one of their own and that Muslims have more "right" to his lineage than Jews.

"Muslims have "more of a right" than Jews to the biblical prophet Moses, declared the imam who has become the new face of the proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero...Imam Abdallah Adhami also urged Muslims to "compete" with other religions..."We must be doing it first, we must compete with you to be doing more of that. We want to fast Ashura too, because that's the day God saved Moses; that is certainly a day to be celebrated. We have more right to Moses," stated Adhami in a 2008 lecture obtained and reviewed by WND..."

[source, [see, Aaron Klein, Ground Zero Imam, 'We have more of a right to Moses', http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=253421

Adhami has replaced the embattled imam Feisal Rauf as chief public spokesman for the proposed mega-mosque.

The disclosure is simply another bit of evidence proving that the plan to build the mosque is not a peaceful and healing gesture but rather an effort to erect a triumphalist totem to Islamic conquest on hallowed ground.

The New York coterie of political hacks who support this effort had better take note, it 's now part of the public record that this mosque is intended to serve as a beachhead for radical Muslims to spread their religious bigotry.

Mayor Bloomberg, if after digesting this information you still support this abomination, we suggest that you spend a few months in Saudi Arabia to experience the wonders of Shari'a up close and personal - suggestion, leave your Torah at home.

January 20, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In December 2010 I reported that Christian asylum seekers in three thirds of the asylum seekers centers in Holland (so-called "AZC's") are seriously intimidated by Muslim asylum seekers. Too many Muslim converts to Christianity - often refugees from totalitarian Muslim societies - live in fear. However, the problem of harassing or attacking Christians is much more widespread. Many Christians in Iraq are persecuted by radical Muslims who bomb their churches, kill their pastors and priests. Many of them flee to the West. (Some them end up in Dutch asylum seekers centers where they once again face harassment by militant Muslims.) Coptic churches in Egypt have also been bombed. There was a major terror attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt, on New Year's day, when 25 Coptic Christians were killed.

Iran's "Press TV", Lebanon's Grand Mufti, a Muslim Brotherhood official and an Egyptian lawyers group suggested that agents of the Israeli Mossad - "zionist fingerpints" - were behind the church blast. In a recent essay Raymond Ibrahim, author of the noteworthy book "The Al Qaeda Reader," points out that "Islamists accuse Egypt's Christians of behaving like? Islamists." "Islamists regularly abduct, abuse, brainwash, and compel Coptic girls to convert - and now Copts are accused of doing the exact same thing; Islamists regularly smuggle and stockpile weapons, including in their holy places - and now Copts are accused of doing the exact same thing. Islamists are constantly either trying to break away or conquer infidel nations - and now Copts are accused of doing the exact same thing; Islamic martyrdom means participating and dying in jihad - and now Christian martyrdom is defined as the exact same thing." "This recent batch of bizarre accusations is making Muslims more irate and paranoid, and bodes greater evil for Egypt's beleaguered Christians."

January 19, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In an interview given to Politico [see, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47756.html] Representative Peter King, the Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, essentially claimed that the self-appointed spokesmen for American Islam are only giving lip service to ending the threat of Muslim terrorism.

"...It's the fact that there's a real threat coming from this attempted radicalization of the community and it's, in many ways, coming from overseas...The leadership of the community is not geared to cooperation..."

The tactic these pressure groups have employed is intentionally deceptive and hints at a more sinister motive, generating endless streams of public relations statements suggesting cooperation, while in private, counseling the Muslim community, the Umma to "Build a wall of resistance, don't talk to the FBI," as CAIR California recently did [see image inset and Fox News, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/13/cair-says-anti-fbi-poster-misinterpreted/] then disingenuously countering [after hastily pulling the poster from its website] that it was all a big misunderstanding.

As he has stated on many occasions, until September 11, 2001 King enjoyed an excellent relationship with New York's Muslim leaders, but that all ended after the attacks as the alphabet soup of - often foreign influenced - Islamist pressure groups adding insult to injury, embarking on a nationwide snake-oil tour, crying Islamophobia, when none existed.

January 17, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Writing for Family Security Online, Lt. Col James Zumwalt [USMC, Ret.] makes the claim that without the active support of Pakistan, the U.S. will be unsuccessful in defeating the Afghan Taliban and hence see victory slip through its fingertips.

Zumwalt - like many knowledgeable observers - bemoans the loss of former Pak president Musharraf, who was far more dedicated to fighting the jihadis, than the current leader, Mr. Zardari, "But with the resignation of strongman Musharraf in August 2008 and his replacement by Asif Ali Zadari, the same military commitment to containing the militants in FATA was not there..." [see, For Want Of Pakistani Enlightenment Afghanistan Will Be Lost, http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8431/pub_detail.asp]

Actually, Lt. Col. Zumwalt might be painting a rosier picture than reality might suggest. While he seems to suggest that it is possible to find common ground between U.S. and Pakistani security interests, he fails to sufficiently factor in the mindset of most Pakistanis, including the country's leadership - this is a deeply fundamentalist, paranoid and expansionist Islamic society. Fact is, at base level Pakistan is doctrinally more in tune with the Taliban than it is with the West.

It is not for any lack of knowledge that the jihadi influence continues to permeate Pakistan's ISI security force and its military leadership. That level of devotion is a given and unremarkable given societal standards.

This is why we find all of the recent "full out" plans for rooting out the Taliban extremists less than ineffective - the words are there, but the heart is not similarly committed, especially when it seems to them that these actions are being forced on them by the West [i.e., the outside Christian world] and not internally dictated.

January 13, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In a piece carried by a Taliban/al-Qaeda friendly website, we find it claimed that 200,000 American Hispanics are converting to Islam each year. Of course the information has since been disseminated by the usual suspects.

The article refers to a Jan. 7 New York Times piece which benignly states, "While the majority of Hispanics in the United States are Catholic, some studies have estimated that there are as many as 200,000 Hispanic converts to Islam in this country..." [source, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/nyregion/09muslims.html].

It seems that some of the basis for the Times' article might be based on a 2006 Christian Science Monitor item, " The population of Hispanic Muslims has increased 30 percent to some 200,000 since 1999, estimates Ali Khan, national director of the American Muslim Council in Chicago..."

So we have a circle of disinformation typical of Islamist propaganda - a legit news source presents conjecture possibly of benefit to Islamist da'wa efforts with no substantiation outside of a Chicago imam's "estimate."

Two factors are at work here, the first being an example of how urban myths come into public consciousness and the second, that there are always parties interested in expanding upon these conspiracy theories for their own political benefit.

January 11, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Almost before the body was cold after the January 7 assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer by a member of his inner guard, 500 of Pakistan's religious scholars and imams released a statement condoning the murder, stating that Taseer met a just fate because he violated the country's Shari'a inspired blasphemy laws.

As we noted on the day of the bloodshed [see Assassination Of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer - Pakistani Islamists Silence Critic Of Blasphemy Laws] the killer said that his actions were justifiable under Shari'a, "What makes this a religious based killing of special importance is the role that Mr. Taseer played in speaking out against Pakistan's Shari'a based "blasphemy" laws, which prescribe harsh punishment for those who are thought to have insulted Islam or its prophet, Mohammed. In this case "insulting Islam," was merely Taseer speaking out against a single aspect of Shari'a, with no apparent or consequent criticism of the religion itself. [note: Taseer's killer stated under interrogation that his motive was the governor's opposition to the blasphemy laws]..."

The killer's stated reason for acting, far from being an anomaly in this overwhelmingly Muslim country, appears to be the consensus opinion of a substantial portion of Pakistan's Islamic scholars, who find the death penalty for blasphemy thoroughly consistent with the Qur'an and the accompanying Sunnah.

According to MEMRI's translation, the clerics' statement read in part:

"[The clerics] asked Muslims, in a joint statement, not to express any sympathy or sorrow over the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, declaring that no one should participate in his funeral prayer or try to lead the prayer. Those who support the perpetrators of blasphemy against Prophet [Muhammad] are also blasphemers. Lauding the bravery and sense of honor for faith and religion of the Prophet's lover Ghazi Malik Mumtaz Hussain, who assassinated the governor, the leaders and clerics of Jamaat Ahl-e-Sunnat said that this brave person has maintained the 1400 years of Muslim tradition, and has held the heads of 1.5 billion Muslims of the world high with pride..."

January 10, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Despite, or most likely because of president Obama's lack of attention to Iran's hand in international terrorism, Israel is now facing a great threat to its existence, with Iran's proxies busily arming Hezbollah for an even more destructive war.

This is the chilling conclusion of a new study by the Jewish Center For Public Affairs [JCPA] authored by Jacques Neriah [see, http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=5660&TTL=Iran_Steps_Up_Arming_Hizbullah_Against_Israel Iran Steps Up Arming Of Hezbollah Against Israel

Among Nerieh's concerns:

"Damascus Airport has been identified as the transit point for airlifts of Iranian arms that were subsequently transferred to Hizbullah via the open Syrian-Lebanese border, under the supervision of the Syrian security services.

A senior Pentagon official has divulged that Hizbullah has 50,000 rockets and missiles, including 40-50 Fatah 110 missiles and 10 SCUD-C ground-to-ground missiles. Furthermore, some 10,000 Hizbullah fighters have been provided with a broad range of modern weapons, while the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have trained Hizbullah teams to operate these weapons."

This Iranian effort is not restricted to the Middle East but is worldwide in its scope, "The Iranian intelligence services, operating in the framework of the Revolutionary Guards, have built many cells in Africa, most of which rely on Shiite emigrants from Lebanon. This is being undertaken in the framework of the African Division of the Jerusalem Corps of the Guards, an effort headed by Gen. Qassem Suleymani. After training in Iran, they serve as a nucleus for recruiting others and provide a base for Iranian intelligence activity in their countries."

"We see the upcoming King hearings, rather than being divisive, serving as a litmus test for these American Muslim organizations. If over the next few weeks and months CAIR, ISNA, MPAC resolve to support the goal of the hearings and positively participate in them, they will have demonstrated a willingness to make a laudable difference.

If on the other hand, they continue to allege that there is no problem with increasing radicalization among American Muslims and that King and his ilk are Islamophobes, beating up on a "peaceful" Islam, then their agenda will become obvious for all to see and they will no longer have cover under which to hide."

It didn't take long for America's self-appointed Muslim spokesmen to slam King and the hearings for promoting Islamophobia, with CAIR stating on Jan 3, "Rep. Peter King's plan to investigate the "radicalization of the American Muslim community and homegrown terrorism" is the knee-jerk reflex of a demagogue who has made a career out of inflaming people's fears...."

January 7, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - On Tuesday, Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, was assassinated by one of his body guards who pumped 27 bullets into his body. [see, South East Asian News Agency, http://www.sananews.net/english/2011/01/05 /elliot-force-cop-shot-down-governor-salman-taseer/]

The event, as with much news concerning the threat posed by Islamism, was immediately buried by the majority of the MSM or ignored entirely.

What makes this a religious based killing of special importance is the role that Mr. Taseer played in speaking out against Pakistan's Shari'a based "blasphemy" laws, which prescribe harsh punishment for those who are thought to have insulted Islam or its prophet, Mohammed. In this case "insulting Islam," was merely Taseer speaking out against a single aspect of Shari'a, with no apparent or consequent criticism of the religion itself. [note: Taseer's killer stated under interrogation that his motive was the governor's opposition to the blasphemy laws]

January 6, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Along with several other politicians who have made the same decision, Florida State Representative Ari Porth has cancelled his speaking engagement at this weekend?s Fort Lauderdale conference for the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA], due to information he received about the group's underlying ideology.

Joe Kaufman, Chairman of Americans Against Hate, a watchdog group concerned about the spread of Islamism, has organized a protest against the planned ISNA meeting. It will take place this coming Saturday, in downtown Fort Lauderdale, from 4:00 - 6:00 pm.

In an AAH press release, Mr. Kaufman said he provided representative Porth with proof of ISNA's radical ideology, its questionable relationships and how it has used its website, "to propagate hate..."

January 5, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The head of the Dutch Freedom Party Geert Wilders has called upon the Chief of Police in Amsterdam to enforce the law or resign. Bernard Welten announced on a television program that if a burqa ban were to be implemented he would practice civil disobedience and not arrest anyone breaking the law.

Other politicians have also reacted furiously to Welten's comments and urged Security and Justice Minister Opstelten to make Welten retract his statements or resign.

A spokesperson for Welten said his remarks must be seen in context and that the burqa ban was not yet in place. [source, translation by author, Wilders - Welten Must Resign, De Telegraaf, http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/8652997/___Welten_moet_biezen_pakken___.html]

The Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, has expressed support for Welten who so far, has refused to reconsider his comments.

The violence occurs against a backdrop of al-Qaeda hectoring Alexandria's Muslims to "destroy the cross," "In the weeks before the New Year's Day suicide bombing of an Egyptian church, al-Qaida-linked websites carried a how-to manual on "destroying the cross," complete with videos on how to build a bomb and the locations of churches to target including the one that was attacked. They may have found a receptive audience in Alexandria, where increasingly radicalized Islamic hard-liners have been holding weekly anti-Christian demonstrations, filled with venomous slogans against the minority community." [source, Anti-Christian drumbeat loud before Egypt attack, AP, http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iohMy5LGHFB_K6a0GyOr8taaAISg?docId=0de41fe06ea6435c815293fcf76e1fa1]

World-wide attempts by stealth jihadists to deny any Islamic connection to the carnage is contradicted by the presence of local Muslims at the scene heard chanting, "Allah Akhbar," God is great, the traditional Muslim war cry, popular since the time of Mohammed.

January 4, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a preeminent radical Muslim spokesman, co-founder of IslamOnline and currently the president of the International Union for Muslim Scholars [IUMS] has, on the Muslim Brotherhood's website - Ikhwanweb - expressed outrage over the recent bombing of a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, calling the perpetrators, "criminals, assassins."

Advancing a line familiar to Muslim apologists, he engages in takfir, declaring that the perpetrators of Islamic fueled violence are not Muslim, asserting they are, "...non-Muslims because Islam asserts the sanctity of human life and strongly prohibits aggression against it." 1.

If this was taking place in a vacuum, or came from a less influential source, it would be easily dismissible. Unfortunately that is not the case here.

A graduate of the Islamic world's most prestigious jihad factory, Al-Azhar, al-Qaradawi's name is indelibly linked with the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the reasons why he fled Egypt and now lives in Qatar.

January 3, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In a January 1 article published by Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood's official English website [see, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=27728] the Muslim Brotherhood [MB, Ikhwan - Muslim brothers - in Arabic] railed against the terror bombing of a Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, " The Muslim Brotherhood vehemently condemns the criminal blast outside Alexandria's church..."

Two days later, on January 3, the same site published a piece which continued to develop the narrative which comprised the last portion of the Jan 1 posting, attacking the Egyptian government for its failure to deal with security, "The attack comes after Egypt's interior ministry promised it would increase security around Christian sites following threats on Egyptian Christians by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and a year after another attack on Coptic Christians - a drive-by shooting in the town of Nag Hammadi that left six Christians and one Muslim dead."

The kicker in the Jan. 3 piece is that it cynically uses the church bombing to attack the MB's main domestic enemy, the Mubarak government, "The Arabic Network expressed its concern that terrorism will be an excuse to impose more restrictions on civil and political freedoms under the pretext of combating terrorism, especially when the international community is complicit with shameful silence; overlooking rigged elections that resulted in an illegitimate parliament and declaring their satisfaction with fragile stability at the expense of democracy."

The network referred to above is ANHRI, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, a group which regularly defends the MB [see, http://www.anhri.net/en/?s=muslim+brotherhood]. Groups such as ANHRI join with similarly motivated organizations to assail governments, many of which are dealing with Islamic terrorism, to become more "democratic."

The methodology here is to force these countries to engage in the ephemera of democracy including "free" elections. In the case of Egypt this would mean "one man-one vote-one time," resulting in an Islamic theocracy run by the Muslim Brotherhood.

January 2, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - A piece published by the WashTimes [see, Egypt Church Bombing Probe Focuses On Local Group, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/2/egypt-church-bombing-probe-focuses-local-group/] and authored by AP is typically absurd, ignoring the country's largest, most influential Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, as a radicalizing factor.

"Egypt does, however, have a rising movement of Islamic hard-liners who, while they do not advocate violence, adhere to an ideology similar in other ways to al Qaeda. There have been fears they could be further radicalized by sectarian tensions. The hard-liners, known as Salafis, have a large and active presence in Alexandria..."

Salafism is a very old Muslim sect, whose adherents seek to return to the "purity" of early Islam, a sentiment similar [and compatible] with that of the Wahhabists, who dominate Saudi religious orthodoxy.

The resurgence of fundamentalist Islam is not new in Egypt or anywhere in the Muslim world by any means, with scholars tracing the turn towards radicalization to the inception of what has become its chief proponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, created in 1928 by Hassan Al Banna.

It's noteworthy to observe that Salafism is referred to favorably and often on the Brotherhood's English language website.

For example in an article published in Egypt's state newspaper, Al-Ahram [December 25-Jan 1, edition] as well as the MB website Khalil al-Anani discusses the Brotherhood's stance on participation in Egyptian elections, praising its Salafist tone, "...the fatwa is fundamentalist par excellence, not just in its language, which is closer to conventional Salafist rhetoric than it is to the more moderate rhetoric one is accustomed to hearing from the Brotherhood, but also in its unavoidable political and religious ramifications." [source, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=27381&ref=search.php]

Despite its past history, the author's tone chides the Brotherhood for not being sufficiently fundamentalist.

The role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism looms large. "Milestones," a book by the MB's chief theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, is often considered central to the modern Islamic fundamentalist movement.

The below video from Islamtube, a radical Muslim website, touting the importance of Qutb and Milestones.

January 1, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The jihad against Middle East Christians showed no signs of lessening in the New Year, as a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device at the Coptic Christian Saints Church in Alexandria, Egypt, killing over 20 and wounding dozens more. [see, Mubarak Blames "Foreign Hands" For Church Bomb, http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/01/01/egypt-church-bombing.html]

Despite president Mubarak's effort to shift blame to outsiders - primarily al-Qaeda - Egypt's intolerance of its Christian population has long been documented. Cairo's Al-Azhar University has functioned as the primary training institute for imams for nearly a millennium, having produced such luminaries as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin-Laden's second in command and Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh," currently serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

New Al-Qaeda Publication Honors Role Of Muslim Women In Jihad

March 14, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - As detailed by Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism, New Magazine Aims to Push Jihadi Women, al-Qaeda is now specifically targeting Muslim women, praising and alerting them for a potentially greater role in keeping the jihad alive and on track.

This greater presence, is at once an effort to shift as well as redefine the role of jihadist Muslim women, from that of front-line Islamist killer, ala suicide bomber, Wafa Idris, to that of "home maker to the jihad."

"The Majestic Woman portrays the women of al-Qaida primarily as mothers, sisters, and daughters of the jihad, not warriors. Strict observance of mandates of Shariah law, such as the niqab, and support for their husbands, forms the primary basis of their jihad. Many of the articles also cover character development, stressing the importance of providing a calm and peaceful home. The article 'Tolerance and Patience' shows them as the keepers of the home front. "That is of considerable importance, my sister in Islam, that you produce from your home a delicious meal, with is beautiful and soothing," the article says. 'He finds in the marriage his rest after the misery; he finds in you the home and warmth after hardship.'"

The mind reels - "Hello my beloved, how was work today? Insha'Allah, it wasn't too stressful. Why don't you take off those blood soaked fatigues, slip into something a little more comfortable and watch al-Jazeera until dinner is ready..."

Al-Qaeda's sophistication is evident in such productions, taking advantage of the new media and crafting such a potentially useful message to further the aims of this murderous group.

March 13, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - On Friday night, in the Jewish town of Itamar, Israel, a team of Muslim terrorists slipped through the security barrier and broke into the residence of Udi and Ruth Fogel.

What followed were acts of cruelty so ghastly that most media sources have refused to publish the images, assuming they gave the attack any mention at all.

Entering the home, apparently through an open window, during the Jewish Sabbath [Shabbat] these barbarians proceeded to butcher the family.

According to combined sources, they somehow missed the family's 6 year old son, who was sleeping on the couch but found the father in the bedroom, asleep with a new born baby whereupon their throats were slashed, nearly to the point of decapitation.

The mother, upon leaving the bathroom while the mayhem was occurring, was set upon by these animals, and stabbed to death.

They then entered the bedroom of the 11 year old son, who was reading on his bed. They also slashed his throat, killing him like the parents. The also killed his three year old brother, stabbing him several times through the heart.

Fortunately, in their haste, they missed the 2 year old who was also sleeping, but apparently in a separate room.

The killers then left the residence and fled through the same breach in the security fence they has used as an entry point.

One member of the family, an older daughter had been out, but returning to her home became alarmed when she found the door locked.

She went to a nearby house, where a Rabbi lived and they both returned and woke the 6 year old son who had slept through the ordeal. He then unlocked the door. The Rabbi departed but quickly returned with a weapon when the daughter - assaulted by the butchery - ran screaming from the house. The Rabbi fired several shots into the air to alert the defense team.

Finding suspicious footprints, at 3:30 a.m., Saturday morning, the security team followed them back to the Arab village of Avrata.

In a related event, upon the announcement of this atrocity in Hamas governed Gaza, citizens passed out candy and rejoiced. [source, Israel News http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4041106,00.html]

"Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.

Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy "is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank."

It's impossible to put into words the dimension of the evil that Islamic jihad represents. No words or grouping thereof can do these acts of depraved religious violence justice, so we have decided to let the following pictures give testament to the evil which Western civilization is facing and refuses to adequately confront.

Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Clapper, Ms. Napolitano and the rest of your malfeasant, cowardly group of terror enablers. Look at the pictures of this poor family, we suggest you imagine your dearest in their place.

This was not a "man-caused disaster," nor is it the work of extremists or insurgents or freedom-fighters.

This is the face of pure and absolute evil, this is the face of your enemy. He lies in wait at your doorstep, he has already infiltrated the country and its institutions. He hides behind brave sounding organizational names.

He is not satiated by the destruction of some formerly anonymous family on the front-lines of the war half-a-world away. He is coming for your wife, your daughter your newborns. He is cruel, ruthless and devoid of mercy because he believes he is under the direction and guidance of his god.

The enemy seeks to destroy the West because it rejects the entreaties of Shari'a, refuses to "submit."

You have limited time to act, if you are not capable, lack the understanding, desire or will to act, this society will eventually produce someone who will end this madness, with the violence of this enemy repaid a hundred times, a thousand times over.

That is the only message fanatics understand.

The Fogel's only offense was to believe in a merciful loving God, rather than a vengeance filled, hateful monster to which the enemy bows.

How long will this Holocaust be allowed to continue? We in the West are all one now, atheist, gay, straight, Jewish, Catholic, agnostic, young old, male and female.

March 11, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, which contains Europe's largest Muslim population, has fired his diversity advisor, Abderrahmane Dahmane, after he urged Muslims to quit Sarkozy's UMP party, upon the disclosure that a scheduled national debate regarding whether Islam's codes are compatible with a free society, would go forward.

Over the last 5 years France has been the scene of numerous Muslim uprisings, usually accompanied by riots and car burnings. The resentment lingers however, with swaths of largely Muslim areas now being considered "no-go" zones by the police.

According to the BBC [see, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12714957] it seems that Mr. Dahmane's commitment to diversity is less than total:

"The debate will explore firstly how "the practice of religions may be compatible with the rules of the secular republic", and secondly "the question of Islam in France." Speaking on Thursday, Mr. Dahmane compared the situation of French Muslims to that of Jews during World War II and said the debate had been planned by a "handful of neo-Nazis."

Though France has distinguished itself among its Continental brethren for its refusal to buckle to Shari'a [recently banning burqas for example] the Islamists are apparently unwilling to grant any concessions to the country's contrarian Chief Executive.

March 10, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - On the eve of Representative Peter King's historic and long overdue investigation into the causative factors behind the increasing radicalization of American Muslims, some Democrat legislators are launching an all-out campaign of disinformation, smearing the American public as being Islamophobic.

In this effort they are carrying water for Islamist groups, who are rightfully fearful of what Mr. King's hearings might uncover.

Below a "Sense of Congress" "Dear Colleague," resolution being pushed by John Conyers [D, MI], Andre Carson [D, IN] and Hansen Clarke [D, MI], which states, "...the federal government should take steps to counter anti-Muslim sentiment. Over the last decade, the American Muslim community has confronted a festering level of suspicion which has manifested itself in hostile government policies and bias from the general public..."

"Cosponsor Sense of Congress Res. Expressing that Federal Government Should Take Steps to Counter Anti-Muslim Sentiment

Please join us as an original co-sponsor of the resolution expressing the sense of Congress that the federal government should take steps to counter anti-Muslim sentiment. Over the last decade, the American Muslim community has confronted a festering level of suspicion which has manifested itself in hostile government policies and bias from the general public. A CBS/ New York Times poll released in mid-September showed that as many as 20 percent of Americans said they have negative feelings toward Muslims because of the September 11th terrorist attacks. While Congress has confronted some of the more violent manifestations of this bias, the general climate faced by the community has continued to create barriers to full participation in public life that should be addressed by official government policy.

We believe that this sense of Congress is a logical step toward sending the message that the American Muslim community should be able to enjoy the rights guaranteed under the Constitution to the same extent as all other Americans. Communities should be protected from the threat of violence and suspicion that was at the heart of last Januarys thwarted attack against the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan. They should also be able to rely on law enforcements fundamental integrity and respect for First Amendments protected rights. Ultimately, the American Muslim community should be able to rely on the federal government to lead the effort in fostering an open climate of understanding and cooperation. Only through a balanced examination of the challenges facing the nation will we establish a strong policy framework for protecting security, while respecting the Constitution and the interests of affected communities.

It is essential that the federal government send the message that we all must work together to guarantee the security of our country and that no community should be singled out for suspicion. We hope that you will join us in sending that message by co-sponsoring this resolution. To cosponsor or to find out more information, please call Keenan Keller of the Judiciary Committee Democratic staff at 5-6906.

Sincerely,

Rep. John Conyers, Jr.

Rep. Andre Carson

Rep. Hansen Clarke"

This cynical effort is really an indictment of the citizens of the United States, casting them as anti-Muslim bigots, a familiar talking point advanced by U.S. Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

The charge - and these Congressmen should know it - is factually incorrect, as FBI statistics clearly demonstrate that hate crimes committed against Muslim Americans are almost nonexistent.

In short Mr. Conyers, Carson and Clarke are spreading disinformation and propaganda, shilling for discredited Islamist pressure groups.

Of the 123 crimes committed against Muslims because of their religion only 5 were aggravated - serious - assaults."

This and similar stunts by the Democrats [see, Breaking! - Capitol Hill Alarmed Over Intimidation By Islamist Groups Preceding King Hearings are clear signs of desperation, that they have lost control of the party's long-held agenda of whitewashing the national security threat posed by American Islamists, with many actually refusing to admit that the West is engaged in a civilizational war against a totalitarian enemy, clearly as dangerous as was Soviet communism, which seeks by any means to place the non-Muslim world under the yoke of Shari'a.

Though these Democrat congressmen talk a good game about freedom of speech and respect for the First Amendment, they are, by their actions, showing contempt for these bedrock American concepts.

In spreading these malicious falsehoods, they are advocating censorship of political speech, attempting to stifle anything which might be interpreted as being critical of or "insulting" to Islam - a key Shari'a principle, with severe penalties in many Muslim societies.

This outrageous "Sense of Congress" resolution can only be understood as a bold move to criminalize speech, making criticism of Islam a hate crime. In a larger and darker sense it's a first step in making America Shari'a compliant, a proposition which is not only un-American, but unconstitutional on its face.

On that point these folks should familiarize themselves with the U.S. Constitution, upon which they are urinating. Specifically we refer to Article VI, paragraph 2, also known as the "supremacy clause," making the Constitution - not Shari'a or any other system of governance - the sole and immutable law of the land:

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding."

This is only the beginning of the intimidation these people are planning; as these hearings [watch them here] get underway, we expect more of this type of reprehensible behavior. As the old saying goes, "the pioneers take the arrows."

Commentary - Government Funded "Science," Toxins Move Up On The Worry List

By DENNIS T. AVERY

March 8, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Forty thousand researchers and clinicians have just written to the journal Science -through their professional societies-asking for broader and quicker testing of "new chemicals in our environment." Eight societies, including the geneticists, endocrinologists, developmental biologists and others say that 12,000 new substances are being registered with the America Chemical Society every day. They admit that not many of these "new substances" will ever make it into the environment.

Still, the societies are asking the federal government to broaden testing beyond toxicology, into such unproven dangers as trace levels of bodily toxins and potential endocrine disruption. This would, of course, employ far more of the learned societies' members.

Do these professional societies think they have learned a lesson from the climate modelers? To wit: if you want more of your members profitably employed, get the Feds to give them lots of nice, salaried government jobs with hefty retirements-to solve some newly concocted media-driven scare The public is always looking for another scare to tickle their fear genes and the congress will happily fund such projects, with your money.

Climatologists are now the third-best-paid profession in the world, with many billions of dollars flowing into their research projects-since they elevated a net global warming of 0.2 degrees C over the last 70 years into an international emergency.

I recently got invited to a lecture on detoxifying my body, presented by a genuine "former professional tennis player." I managed to resist the invitation, but I did go on the Web to look at the detox alternatives out there

Some of them were outright shilling for organic farming:

1. "Most of the animals we eat are raised on factory farms. Seek a butcher shop were organically farmed meat is sold. It will be more expensive, perhaps that will help curb your consumption."

My favorite is the website of the ayurvedic healing system from India. "You need this 'renewal' periodically if you feel 'a general lack of zest for life', feel 'spaced out'; if you have 'a general sense of malaise'." Naturally, they recommend cleansing your system under the care of an ayurvedic physician. Some of the advice they give is actually pretty sound: Stick to lighter, easier-to-digest foods, and eat lots of cleansing fruits and vegetables. However, their "detoxifying tea" is probably just tea.

I prefer to heed the wisdom of Dr Graham Colditz, a cancer epidemiologist from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, on the occasion of another cancer scare report being delivered to President Obama last May:

"We already know what causes most cases of cancer, and it's not pollution or chemicals lurking in our water bottles. It's tobacco use and other unhealthy behaviors. . . . Maybe up to 4 percent of cancer in the western world is caused by contaminants and pollution and yet we are chasing new, unknown causes. . . . The damage is it distracts us, as a society, from actually acting on the things that are already in our grasp." He mentioned giving up smoking, eating a pound of fruits and vegetables per person per day (cutting cancer risk by 25 percent), drinking less alcohol, and eating less red meat."

Thanks to our secure and safe food and water supply and world-class access to modern medicine, we are living long enough to get the diseases associated with old age. As baby boomers see 65 in the rear view mirror, they may treasure the remaining years enough to take Dr. Colditz's advice.

DENNIS T AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442; email to cgfi@hughes.net, or visit us on the Web at www.cgfi.org.

March 8, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Melvin Bledsoe the heartbroken father of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad [aka, Carlos Leon Bledsoe] - responsible for the 2009 jihadist attack on the Little Rock Army Recruiting Center, killing one and wounding another - is slated to appear as a witness on the third panel of Rep. Peter King's investigation into the rise of radicalism among domestic Muslims.

We assume the purpose of Mr. Bledsoe's appearance is to trace the path his son took in becoming an Islamic holy warrior/mujahideen/jihadist, and he has a wealth of information to impart.

As per standard operating procedure these days, law enforcement officials have been tight lipped regarding Muhammad's reason for the shootings, clearly nervous at the prospect of having to deal with the defendant's claimed membership in al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula and his proud Islamism.

In a series of notes sent to the Memphis based newspaper, Commercial Appeal and also to Judge Herbert W. Wright, a Pulaski County Circuit Court judge, Muhammad provided great insight into his motivation for his rampage, which he claimed was Islamic law:

Below from these letters:

"...how I became Muslim. I don't believe in the word "convert." What I use "revert" because we Muslims believe that all mankind are born into Islam...I went to Yemen to learn, meaning more about Islam...Yemen is quoted from our beloved Prophet...as a place of faith and wisdom...it is one of the few places left in the Islamic world where people are actually still Muslims...[speaking of his source of income in Yemen]...I felt uncomfortable teaching the language of the Enemy to my brothers and sisters...my wife's [he was married in Yemen] family is from Abyan...which was bombed by American drones...by O'l Uncle Sam...they claimed they targeted a meeting of the Mujahedeen...I read a statement from our Shaykh "Anwar Al Awlaki," and he said that they killed 17 women and 23 kids...We want revenge...They kill our soldiers, we kill theirs, but if they bomb our women, children and elders Guess what? We'll bomb theirs..the apostates of Yemeni government are true dogs. I wish I had some of their blood on my hands..."

Separate letter to the judge:

"I'm writing this because I want to plead guilty. To all charges I face...I'm affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Member of Abu Basir's Army. This was a jihad attack on infidel forces...I believe it was justified...according to Islamic laws and the Islamic religion. Jihad to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims..." [source, I'm Al-Qaeda, Commercial Appeal, http://www.commercialappeal.com/jihad]

By further delving into the information contained in his son's very lucid notes, perhaps the American people will finally be able to fully grasp the nature and especially the ideology [political Islam] which drives our enemies.

Turkish Journalists Arrested In Suspicious "Plot" To Overthrow Government

March 7, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - With the Middle East in turmoil with a substantial Islamist component, Turkey seems to be following suit. Regardless the matter of these arrests may be far more complex and murky than they appear, given the so-far known facts.

EuroNewsNet [http://www.euronews.net/2011/03/07/concern-as-turkish-journalists-charged-with-terrorism/] today reported that, "...four journalists and a writer," have been arrested, charged in an alleged plot to overthrow the government.

The men are claimed to have been associated with a group characterized as being "ultra nationalist," and expressed vigorous criticism of the current regime in their writing.

There are reportedly hundreds arrested on similar accusations, some of them have been held for years with no prospect of ever coming to trial.

Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan [chairman of the AK party] has been widely considered to be a moderate Muslim, despite his calculated anti-Semitism, which has become notorious.

However, a study, referred to by Dr. Daniel Pipes in a February 9, 2009 posting [go here, Erdogan Bares His Fangs, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/01/erdogan-bares-his-fangs] and authored by Gil Feiler and Edo Harel [see, The Political Logic of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's Attacks on Israel, http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/perspectives65.html] states:

"Erdogan's seemingly spontaneous outburst was a carefully considered move in Turkey's internal power struggle between the ruling Islamist party AKP and the opposing military establishment, and highlights a major shift in the country's balance of power. [The] attacks on Israel fall within the new phase of seeking out open confrontation with Turkey's secular watchdogs. It should be understood that the key aspect of Erdogan's attacks on Israel is not just in uniting the Turkish public behind him, but in uniting them against the military and the secular establishment..."

Since then Erdogan has eliminated all subtlety regarding his politics, his active support of the Hamas aid flotilla inappropriately named "Free Gaza," betrayed him as an Islamist allied with some of the most murderous movements coming out of the Muslim world.

This might very well be one case in which the often suspect "human rights" community" is correct. These writers clearly seem to have been singled out because of their journalistic activism.

Seen in this way, the arrests could easily be just another element in Erdogan's suppression of secularism, as he steadily tries to steer Turkey towards a society guided by Shari'a.

King Hearings: The Left, Free Speech And Shari'a

EFFORT TO STOP KING HEARINGS, AN ATTEMPT TO IMPOSE SHARI'A PRINCIPLES

March 7, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The prospect of Congressman Peter King's hearings, investigating the extent to which Muslim Americans have become radicalized, especially since 9/11, has whipped America's dominant political culture into a Pavlovian froth not seen for decades.

They are scared to death, causing the Obama administration and its allies to attempt to crucify Mr. King even before the gavel falls on Thursday.

Last week we documented in Breaking! - Capitol Hill Alarmed Over Intimidation By Islamist Groups Preceding King Hearings the extent to which long time Democrat members of the House were working behind the scenes to scuttle King's investigation, casting him as a bigot - a standard talking point of the left. This effort at intimidating Mr. King's rightful pursuit, legitimized by Congress' oversight authority, extends to the ludicrous, where a DailyKos staffer/organizer/trainer [think ACORN with Soros funding and a collectivist philosophy] trying to be passed off as a legitimate presenter in a Congressionally organized and endorsed event.

All of this was entirely expected and predictable. The enemies of traditional America, know that King is, with this investigation, in an allegorical manner picking at the scab under which the leftist/Marxist/Islamist nexus has been given refuge from scrutiny.

This unholy alliance of anti-democratic, authoritarian forces fears being outed in a very public manner. Unfortunately for them, they have already failed.

Due to the work of Mr. King, his allies in Congress, a large and growing coalition of well organized citizen-led opposition and a few heroic media types willing to stand up to the leftist/Islamist effort to censor political speech, America is rapidly becoming aware for the first time of and concerned about, topics banned by this administration - Islamism, Shari'a, Islamic terrorism and the Muslim Brotherhood front groups operating in this country.

The attacks have become increasingly hysterical [with a so-called mainstream journo-slug actually inferring that Mr. King has a history of supporting terrorism...puuuhhhllleeeease sir, immediately discontinue your medication, and lie down for a while, ok?] a sure sign of desperation. The truth is that this process can't be reversed despite all the heat and angst being generated.

Actually, it's only going to get worse for those who wish to destroy this culture and replace it with one of their own making. There is no way this is going away, those involved in this effort are not going to be dissuaded, intimidated or stopped, period. Being called an Islamophobe under these circumstances should proudly be worn as a badge of honor.

What we are witnessing here is an official attempt, sanctioned by the Obama administration and extending through the entire structure of the political left and its new buds, the Islamists, to impose a key element of Shari'a on the American public. Their intent is clear, they wish to suppress any criticism of Islam, in any form, equating it with hate speech, already a crime on the Continent which is rapidly [due to our tainted globalist minded judiciary] winging its way to these shores.

If the leftist/Islamist alliance succeeds, it will become a crime to even juxtapose Muslim, Islam or Islamic with any term even vaguely thought to be pejorative.

"Insult the Prophet - go to jail."

Count on it.

The First Amendment is at stake here, we suggest it be defended.

Details on the Committee's first session:

U.S. Rep. Peter T. King (R-NY), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, has announced that on Thursday, March 10 he will convene the first in a series of hearings on radicalization in the American Muslim community. The hearing is entitled: "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response."

The hearings will be led by Mr. King, Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and commence on Thursday, March 10, 2011, at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time. The location will be 311 Cannon House Office Building.

Liberals Questioning Obama's Hard Pro-Islamist Tilt?

March 4, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Not that it takes recognition by a charter member of the MSM to establish a fact already in evidence, but today's piece in the WashPost [see, Scott Wilson, Obama administration prepares for possibility of new post-revolt Islamist regimes, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030305531.html] demonstrates that even some members of left are feeling a bit queasy about the announcement by TeamObama that it is willing to accept Islamist governments establishing themselves in the ME in the wake [it isn't over yet] of the revolutionary/anarchistic movements which have recently sprung up in that part of the world.

"The Obama administration is preparing for the prospect that Islamist governments will take hold in North Africa and the Middle East... The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government"

Anyone carefully watching this administration is well aware that in a myriad of ways it has telegraphed that message since the day Mr. Obama took office - it's the core of Obama's Islamic rapprochement.

The capping event of course was the President's disastrously misguided speech to the Muslim world, delivered at Al-Azhar University in Cairo [with members of the Muslim Brotherhood in attendance, by invitation] the nerve center of the worldwide Wahhabist movement.

Regardless of how this administrations spins it, the President is the one who, through a consistent pattern of appeasement - generated either by ideology or just plain ignorance - put the Muslim world on notice that as far as the U.S. was concerned it was hands off, you folks do whatever you want to do.

This even extends to Iran [whose Islamic theocracy represents a threat nearly as serious as that posed either by Soviets or Mussolini and Hitler's State Socialism] where Mr. Obama has been rendered deaf and mute.

The administration's "new" policy is based upon taking a "wait and see," approach and if a particular country, let's say Egypt is taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood via "democratic" and "free" elections, then that's all she wrote.

"We shouldn't be afraid of Islam in the politics of these countries," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal policy deliberations. "It's the behavior of political parties and governments that we will judge them on, not their relationship with Islam."

The truth is that we have every reason to fear Islamismism, a revolutionary threat doctrine which flatly states its intention to dominate the non-Muslim world.

The geopolitical consequences of the new Obama non-policy are huge. Once such governments are in place, count on Iran and Russia to arm them to the teeth, offensive and defensive weapons, air defense, command and control systems, advisors...the works. Also please remember that Pakistan's Khan [considered a national hero, even after having helped armed Iran and N. Korea] is still peddling his wares if the price is right.

At that point the only way to stop a dangerous regime would be through the application of military force, something no one can imagine this President doing. My goodness, he can't even pull the trigger on setting up a no-fly zone over Libya, let alone landing Marines on the shores of Tripoli.

Obama is doctrinaire in his rejection of the simple principle that the most effective way to deal with enemies who pose an existential threat, is to kill them, burn their cities and break their toys.

So we are left at best with hoping that Obama, the State Department and the national security bureaucracy will be unnaturally lucky in getting regimes that don't threaten us and wish to behave like responsible adults, not 10th century barbarians.

Actually it's worse than that. Even if, perish the thought, TeamObama decided that Egypt was going in the wrong direction, the administration's entire history and two years of inertia causes it to cruise past such thorny issue. Rather it prefers to remain aloof, outside the traditional practice of statecraft, deal making, pushing buttons, making hard choices and/or applying pressure up to and including violence to help establish governments which are reasonably stable and won't become instant threats to the West and its few remaining allies.

Mr. Obama has surrounded himself with a national security/diplomatic team of legendary incompetence - actually far worse that Carter's bumblers. This starts at the top, from the buffoonish James Clapper who is thoroughly unfamiliar with the Muslim Brotherhood, Janet Napolitano, ignorant beyond belief whose claim to fame was allowing large parts of Arizona to be overrun by Mexican drug smugglers and human traffickers, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with absolutely zero diplomatic experience and has proven to be a very dull student to boot. Her malfeasance in allowing the OAS to re-admit Cuba should have gotten her drummed out of State back in 2009 when she skipped town and was actually in the air when the vote occurred. Ditto her handling of Venezuela, now a Hezbollah outpost and Honduras, where she led Team Obama's charge to maintain a corrupt, drug running buddy of Chavez', Manuel Zelaya as president of Honduras.

So there you have it, a team responsible for keeping the United States and really the Western world free, composed of either hard-left ideologues [who probably still fondly remember their Che Guevara T-shirts] or nincompoops who undoubtedly think they are doing a swell job.

Now faced with a deadly serious historic crisis in the ME, the team including the CIC stands confused, immobile and sputtering. This leaves a small but growing number of liberals squirming in their seats and averting their eyes. There will be much more of this before this horrid experiment ends.

March 3, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The Hill is abuzz, swamped in a flurry of emails alleging that self-proclaimed moderate American Muslim groups are engaged in a furious campaign to intimidate those who speak out about the threat posed by Islamism and the spread of Shari'a, Islamic law.

The newest apparent victim, WMAL talker [and former Congressman, R, Iowa] Fred Grandy, who according, to the station simply resigned his position, "Fred Grandy has informed WMAL of his intention to resign from the station and its morning program..." [source, http://www.wmal.com/Article.asp?id=2124417]

WMAL is part of Citadel Broadcasting Company and MediaSpan/MediaSpan Network.

Contradicting WMAL's explanation for Grandy's exit are published reports that Grandy was fired because of his outspokenness regarding Islamic radicalism here in the U.S. Fred's wife, known on the program as Mrs. Fred, typically devoted Grandy's Friday show to exposing the Islamists operating within our borders. [see, Pajamas Media, http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/03/02/cair-gets-fred-grandy-yanked-off-wmal-am/]

Below, a snippet from one of these Congressional emails, providing the tenor and level of concern.

"THIS IS ALL ABOUT FREE SPEECH...Fred Grandy and Mrs Fred are being silenced from talking about Radical Islam, Sharia Law and Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration across America (ESPECIALLY Mrs. Fred who has been the leading force on this issue) ... DON'T LET THIS STOP - SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW - we must make our voices heard NOW, BEFORE IT IS TO LATE - our freedoms are under attack. Thank God for the Grandys' who have been outspoken on this issue - when no one else has dared to "go there" as they have."

As we have noted repeatedly on these pages, America's Islamist groups are quaking over the prospect of being outed by the King hearings and the related investigations which will surely follow.

Their sentiments are entirely understandable, they have much to fear.

Seemingly operating as lackeys for the Islamists, prominent Democrats are officially attacking the King hearings before they even start, in an effort to shut them down.

Next week, Chairman Peter King and the Homeland Security Committee will begin a series of troubling hearings that single out Muslim Americans as the source of "homegrown terrorism" and focus exclusively on the radicalization of Muslim Americans...We urge you to join us in sending the attached letter to Chairman King asking that he reconsider holding these profoundly unfair hearings."

The only thing troubling about these hearings is the willingness of key Democrats to work with the Islamists to suppress the truth, scuttle the First Amendment and prevent Congress' mandated oversight authority.

Another participant in this campaign is Congressman Jim McDermott who authored the following:

I invite you to attend a briefing titled "National Security and Human Rights Messaging: Muslim Americans and Law Enforcement Partnerships" on March 10, 2011 at 11:00am-12:30pm in location TBD. This briefing is hosted by Progressive Congress and the Muslim Public Affairs Council."

About the Muslim Public Affairs Council [MPAC] noted terror expert Steven Emerson notes:

"'MPAC Pursues Islamist Ideology in Guise of Civil Rights Defender'" - Far from being the zealous champion of civil rights that it presents itself to be, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has followed a consistent pattern of defending designated terrorist organizations and their supporters, opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts and spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric..." [source, IPT News, February 9, 2010, http://www.investigativeproject.org/1785/mpac-pursues-islamist-ideology-in-guise-of-civil]

Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism did an exhaustive examination of MPAC, which is available in .pdf format here IPT Investigation, MPAC

So unserious is this, McDermott announced "briefing," that one of the presenters is "Joel Silberman (confirmed), Media Trainer and Strategist at Kos Media, LLC."

KOS Media? Are some members of Congress this deranged? The Daily KOS briefing Congress?

From Wiki, "Daily Kos was founded by Markos Moulitsas...its parent company, Kos Media, LLC, began a fellowship program to help fund a new generation of progressive activists." [source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Kos]

Let's be clear, the game here is simple, the hard-left, operating in an unholy alliance with the American Islamists are seeking nothing short of suppressing criticism of Islam, in any form, in any manner.

As many are increasingly becoming aware, criticism of or "insulting" Islam is a very serious offense in Shari'a. This entire operation of character assassination, designed to kill the King hearings is therefore nothing short of an official effort to enforce Shari'a, Islamic law within the halls of the American Congress!

This is an extraordinarily serious matter, an outrage and we will be following its progress as the King hearings approach.

Pakistan's Only Christian Minister Murdered By Taliban

March 2, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - According to an item carried by the Voice of America, Pakistan's Minister of Minority Affairs - Shahbaz Bhatti - was assassinated by Taliban terrorists today.

The Minister was the only high-level Christian administrator in the Pakistani government.

"...He was a member of the ruling Pakistani People's party headed by Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. Minister Shahbaz Bhatti was critical of the Pakistani blasphemy laws which mandate death for anyone who "insults Islam or is critical of the Prophet Mohammed"

Commentary - America Has Much To Fear From EPA's Carbon Tax

By DENNIS T. AVERY

March 3, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Farmers, along with the rest of us, could get hit with a triple jolt of regulatory shock if the Environment Protection Agency goes forward with its announced controls on carbon emissions. Consumers are already paying heavily for the federal mandate that puts a huge chunk of our corn crop, as ethanol, into our gas tanks instead of into our meat, milk, and eggs. While food costs soar, along with fuel costs, it is a waste of good corn as it contributes almost zero to our energy independence.

Now, the EPA is moving to impose tough limits on carbon emissions from the big power plants across the country -and then plans to screw the new carbon limits down tighter and tighter. Farmers' fuel and electricity costs would go through the roof, along with everybody else's.

The goal, after all, is to make the coal, oil, and natural gas that power most of our power plants too expensive to use. They need to make all our electricity at least slightly more expensive than the ultra-costly solar panels and wind turbines that have failed to produce "Green power" in Europe and, thus far, fail to provide much energy here at home.

After the power plants are stymied, then the farmers will be subject to EPA operating permits for any livestock enterprise emitting more than 100 tons of greenhouse gases per year. Since each cow emits about four tons of methane per annum. 90 percent of the livestock farmers are expected to be over the limit. The EPA estimates the operating permits for livestock farmers would cost the farmers $866 million per year, certainly a low-ball figure. Counting the farmers' paperwork time, this will add more than $1 billion to our annual food costs.

Who will pay the added billion? We will. And, expect by that time to be paying for $8 gasoline and tripled electric bills too. They are paying $3.70 at the pump in California this week.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill), of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently told the Illinois Farm Bureau that the claim the Supreme Court had "required" the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases "is a myth." The Supreme Court actually said EPA should regulate greenhouse gasses "if they could make a determination that the gasses 'significantly endanger human health." Shimkus says the EPA simply repackaged the theoretical risks from the IPPC's computer models, with no other evidence. The EPA is set to act on guesses about the future to regulate our taxes and energy costs in the present.

The little Ice Age ended in 1850, but after 1940, global temperatures trended downward for 35 years - during the first and biggest surge of human-emitted greenhouse gasses that has ever occurred. (We've had a net warming of only 0.2 degrees C since 1940). The IPCC itself says the first greenhouse emissions are theoretically the most powerful - but the post-1940 emissions produced a global cooling! The computers models can't forecast the snowfall over Chicago in 2011, let alone the climate 100 years out. Does the EPA know about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, that shifts our temperatures up and down in 30-year spurts? Or about the 1,500-year climate cycle that has given us more than 500 global warmings in the last million years?

If the cooling trend resumes after the current El Nino/La Nina interruptions, we can expect the planet to cool until 2037. By that time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have picked up their billions of pre-printed energy-rationing coupons and gone elsewhere.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

March 2, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Congressman Frank Wolf [R, VA] joined today in a bipartisan news conference demanding that Pakistan's Minister For Minority Affairs, Bhatti, be given the dignity of a State funeral after having been murdered by the Taliban for his opposition to Pakistan's increasing radicalization.

Mr. Wolf and the group also urged the Obama administration to send a high level delegation to attend the service.

About the tragic assassination, the Congressman stated, "We gather today under tragic circumstances - the assassination of Pakistan's Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, a heroic man of faith whose courageous and outspoken leadership against his nation's draconian blasphemy law made him a prime target of extremist Islamist elements in his country. Bhatti was the only Christian member of the Pakistani cabinet. We have lost a friend and an ally and our prayers are with his Bhattis family and those in Pakistan who mourn his loss and who stood with him in his fight against injustice and intolerance. Bhatti devoted his life to defending the most vulnerable-he is literally a modern day martyr."

Wolf noted that Bhatti, despite the obvious risks associated with speaking out about Pakistan's Shari'a based blasphemy laws, "championed...Asia Bibi, a young Christian mother of five, who was sentenced to death under Pakistans blasphemy law. Only after international intervention was her execution delayed. Her fate, however, remains unclear."

He closed, urging, "the Government of Pakistan to seek justice in this case and to give Bhatti a state funeral, reflective of the import of his life and legacy..."

Soros Lefties At MoveOn Freak! "We could be on the verge of losing in Wisconsin"

March 2, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In an emergency email, just blasted out of the MoveOn coven in Berkeley, these Soros clowns have finally read the writing on the wall; the gig is up and they are going to lose big time along with their union goon buds in Wisconsin.

"Dear MoveOn member,

We could be on the verge of losing in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin 14 - the brave Democratic state senators who left the state to stop the Republican attacks on workers -are under increasing pressure to return to Wisconsin.

Governor Walker is even threatening to lay off thousands of state workers to blackmail Democrats into coming back. And as soon as just one Democratic senator returns, Republicans will be able to jam through their terrible bill.

Unfortunately, over the last 24 hours there have been credible reports from blogs and local news reporters that this is imminent."

Reports are that at least 8 of Wisconsin's Dem legislator runaways, have had enough and know that the public strongly supports the moderate fiscally conservative plan being advanced by Governor Walker.

If this does indeed happen, and we suspect it is imminent, this will represent not only a defeat for entrenched leftist interests within the state, but it will be a clear signal to President Obama that his Alinskyite, "Organizing for America," organization has gone off the rails.

Conservatives, take note, TeamObama isn't omnipotent as they want you to believe. If we keep the courage of our convictions and stand up to the DNC/Soros/Public Service Union thugocracy, America can once again be restored to the grandeur our Founding Fathers envisioned.

King Hearings Gain Support - Sunday NY Rally Planned

March 2, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - This Sunday, a citizen-led coalition of national security conscious organizations will be conducting a rally in support of Rep. Peter King's upcoming hearings on the troubling rise in domestic Islamic radicalism.

Many groups have joined together in this effort to inform the public about the threat posed by the spread of Islamism in the United States.

Sponsored by Liberty Rocks, the gathering will include [but is not limited to] members of the: Coalition to Honor Ground Zero, Liberty Rocks, Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam, 9/11 Families for a Secure America, Sudan Freedom Walk, American Maronite Union, Indian American Intellectuals Forum, www.SecureAmericaNow.org, Alliance for Iranian Women, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, Center for Policy Research in American Education, Women United International and the Alliance for Interfaith Resistance.

Event organizers say they stand alongside the majority of Americans, "who are concerned about our national security," and support King's planned investigation.

Additionally they believe that, rather than denying the civil rights of Muslims, which is not Mr. King's intent, the Congressman's inquiry, represents an honest attempt to protect "the civil and human rights of Americans of all faiths."

Supporters are however quick to add that they don't, "want to live under Shariah, Islamic law." They stress that, "America is not, as Imam Rauf," [the kingpin behind the effort to build the 9/11 mosque] "has claimed, 'Shariah Compliant!'"

The event, entitled, Stand With Us For Homeland Security & Our Rights, is scheduled for Sunday, March 6, 1:30 p.m., 38th Street and 7th Avenue NYC.